Christianity and Civilisation: Part 2, Specific Problems - Emil Brunner

Press Opinions on Part I

" A masterly philosophical survey of the problems of ontology and truth " —
Observe}.

" It is impossible to exaggerate the interest and value of these Lectures " —
Manchester Guardian.

" Marked by lucidity and ease of exposition . . . One of the most distinguished
Continental theologians of our time " — Spectator.

" For one reader at any rate, this is 4 the book of the year ' 55 — Holborn Review.

CHRISTIANITY

AND
CIVILISATION

By

EMIL BRUNNER

SECOND PART :

SPECIFIC PROBLEMS

GIFFORX) LECTURES DELIVERED AT
THE UNIVERSITY OF ST. ANDREWS
1948

LONDON: NISBET & CO., LTD.
22 BERNERS STREET, W.i

First published in igqq

Made and printed in Great Britain

PREFACE

THIS second series of my Gifford Lectures, given at St.
Andrews University in March 1948, is complementary to
the first. While the first was an attempt to work out
something like a Christian philosophy of civilisation dealing with
some basic principles which underlie all civilisation, it is the
scope of this sacond series to give a Christian interpretation of
some of the main features of civilised life. Many readers may
miss some other aspects, such as marriage and the family, which
they feel of equal if not of greater importance than those treated
in this book. If-,so, I completely agree with them, but having
been compelled to restrict myself to nine such subjects (in the
tenth lecture I attempt to give a synoptic view of the whole
field), I think it justifiable to leave out some of the topics which
have been in the focus of Christian thought throughout the
ages as well as in recent times.

As a matter of fact, I am not so much afraid of the reproach
of having treated too few, but rather of the criticism of those
who think I have tried to deal with too many subjects. I hear
them ask how any one man can claim to have competent
knowledge of so many different sectors of civilisation, each being
almost infinite in itself. Again I fully share this view. There
is probably no one — at any rate not the author — who can make
such a claim. Still, it so happens that my life is concerned with
all of these sectors and I have to try to lead it as a Christian, and
the same is true of thousands of my contemporaries. While it
is necessary that Christian men and women particularly com-
petent in one of these fields should speak and write about the
relation of the Christian faith to that particular matter, it seems
to me legitimate, and even necessary, that alongside these mono-
graphs of specialists someone should at least try to give a
synoptic view of the whole (even if he has no expert knowledge

* v

VI PREFACE

of a majority of these subjects), provided that he has given
to all of them prolonged thought as a Christian.

Perhaps I would not have dared to form such a plan had I
not, in lecturing about one of those subjects' which is particularly
remote from my own experience — that of technics, or should I
say technology? — received much encouragement from groups of
experts, both professors and practical technicians. None the
less, I am sure that in every one of these lectures there is much
to be criticised by those who do have expert knowledge in that
particular field. They may be assured that they will find me
sincerely grateful for their criticisms; indeed I have been so
conscious of the inadequacy of my knowledge and my lack of
experience that on several occasions I have felt* like giving up
altogether.

This view of my task made it imperative not to try to give my
lectures an apparent weight of scholarship by quoting many
books. The only scholarship to which I mighf lay claim is that
of a theologian or Christian thinker, who has made up his mind
to apply some of the basic Christian doctrines to some of the
problems of civilisation or culture, of which the urgency is felt
by every live Christian.

The brevity of these lectures, compared with those of most of
my predecessors, is mainly due to the fact that for reasons of
language I could not afford to prepare two sets of lectures, one
for fifty minutes' delivery, the other for publication. Even
within this limitation I should not have succeeded had I not
received most generous help from colleagues at St. Andrews,
particularly Professor Donald Baillie and Professor W. R.
Forrester. Again I wish to thank many other good friends, both
within and outside St. Mary's College, for thejyr sympathy and
hospitality, which made my stay in their town a happy
experience which I shall not forget.

E. B.

CONTENTS

PREFACE

v

I. TECHNICS i

Technics as old as man. The problem of technics new,
resulting from the technical revolution. Technic^ man
precedes technical revolution. Robinson Crusoe. Effects
of the technical revolution on man. The tragic coincidence :
technical revolution in the age of secularisation. Means
and ends reversed. The spiritual cause of this reversal.
The fata> course of technics — towards the abyss ? Ethical
appeal and education inadequate. The Christian alternative
to the technical apocalypse.

II. SCIENCE 1 6

Science ^ounger than technics. Its relation to truth.
Natural science and Geisteswissenschqften. The scientific
ethos. Its Christian basis. No necessary conflict with faith.
The influence of sin upon science. Scientific mythology.
Science and the postulate of " religious neutrality The
value of Christian anthropology for the Geisteswissenschqften.
Science within the totality of human destiny.

III. TRADITION AND RENEWAL .... 29

The modern age anti-traditional. Tradition : cultural
memory. Christianity and tradition. Christianity guardian
of Greek cultural values. Social tradition and social rootless-
ness. Christianity and change. <c Not yet " and *' no more
The newness of life in the Gospel. The revolutionary force
of Christian faith. Renewal of centre and periphery. Revolu-
tionary conservatism.

IV. EDUCATION 43

Education and community. The Socratic programme of
education. Its incomparable influence. Its relation to
Christianity. The German idealist idea of Bildung*
Its aristocratic character. The original Christian idea of
education. Its deformation by theological intellectualism.
The Reformation ignores the Socratic element. Pestalozzi's
rediscovery. Kierkegaard's contribution. Secularist educa-
tion in our age. The Christian idea in the modern setting.

<» vii

WORK

57

Why do men work? The classical (Aristotelian) con-
ception of work. Its influence in the middle ages. The
Marxist idea its counterpart. Luther's Rediscovery <$f voca-
tion. The modern crisis of the " motifs " of work. Its essential
causes. Collectivism unable to restore the dignity of work.
The Christian conception of work, both as stimulus and as
moderating force.

. ART 72

Comprehensive conception of " art The mystery of
art deeper than beauty. Imaginary elevation of existence.
The danger of aestheticism. The second commandment.
" Christian art " ? Form primary in art, but art presupposes
human depth. Art in relation to Roman Catholic and
Protestant religion. Can art survive secularism? The
metaphysical basis of passion. Formalism and barbarism.
Art and " the sabbath

VII. WEALTH • . . 86

Material presuppositions of cultural life. Personality and
property. The abstract material good, money and credit.
Its danger for personality and community. Capitalism
according to Marx. Wealth in the light of the Bible. No
Biblical system of economics. Ethical interest in economic
structure. Communism necessarily totalitarian. The dilemma
of social security and the free society. Christianity and the
economic motif. Onesidedness of Max Weber's theory con-
cerning Calvinistic capitalism. Christianity and secularist
materialism.

VIII. SOCIAL CUSTOM (SITTE) AND LAW . 101

Destruction of social habit by individualistic rationalism.
Social habit basis of personal morality. The New Testament
and social habit. Along with artistic " style " social habit
destroyed in the last century. Law filling tlje gap. Natural
and positive law. Positivism. Pre-state and state-Law.
Gospel and Law. The created order. Equal rights in
Stoicism and Christianity, Polarity of personal rights and
social obligation. Law and sin. Secularism increases co-
ercive law.

. POWER . 114

Restrictive definition. Having and using power. Will-to-
power. Material and spiritual elements in power. Power

CONTENTS IX

and freedom. Limiting and monopolising ultimate power,
the state. The " division of power 9 \ State sovereignty and
God-so¥ereignty. ^ The unlimited state power, the totalitarian
state. Power in inter-state relations. The attempts to limit
national sovereignty. The universal world state in the light
of Christian faith. Culture, power and religion.

X. THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF CIVILISATION

AND CULTURE 127

Coming back to the first lecture. What can Christian
civilisation mean ? Man alone produces civilisation. Essence
of civilisation. Its basic motifs. Civilisation human, but not the
Human. Why it is 4 c formal ". The place of civilisation and
culture in the Christian conception of life. Some objections
answered.^ The Christian idea : the human above the cul-
tural ; the physical-spiritual unity of man ; the civic ele-
ment fundamental, therefore civilisation above culture.
The place of tradition and education. The " highest cultural
values " — how far ? Art and science in the service of God
and of man. The present chances for the realisation of the
Christian idea.

EPILOGUE. CHRISTIANITY BEYOND

CIVILISATION 140

CHRfSTIANITY AND CIVILISATION

Second Part : Specific Problems
I

TECHNICS 1

A MONGST all the problems of civilisation with which we
l\ are dealing in these lectures, the problem of " technics "
JL JL is the youngest. All the others have worried Western
mankind and Christianity for centuries; not so technics. In
earlier times people had hardly become conscious of it, much
less did they think of it as a problem. To-day, however, it is
in the front line, because — to a degree previously unheard of —
technics — or shall I say technology? — determines the life of
man, endangers the human character of civilisation, and even
threatens the very existence of mankind. Whilst half a century
ago the startling progress of technology was the basis of an
optimistic philosophy of life and progress, since the two world
wars, and particularly since the first atomic bomb was dropped
on Hiroshima, the conception of technics has become more and
more connected with gloomy, even desperate, perspectives for
the future. The question whether civilisation and mankind will
survive has become the problem of the hour, so that we cannot
but start with it.

This fact — that technology has recently become the most
urgent of all problems — contrasts strangely with the other fact
that technics is as old as humanity. Human history begins with
the invention of the first stone tool, that is, with technics. It is
in the shape of homo faber that man first shows himself as a
being transcending nature. From this beginning technics, that

1 Part of the material of this lecture has been used in an article of The Christian
Mews Letter } 1 948.

2 TECHNIC^ [LECT.

is, the creation and use of artificial tools serving the life of man,
has increasingly distinguished man's life from that of the
animal, and imprinted upon it a specifically human character.
The history of technics from its beginning to, say, ths time of
James Watt, is characterised by an almost unbroken, more or
less equable and, therefore, quite unobtrusive progress. Step
by step man makes headway in solving the task which he recog-
nises as his own, to subdue nature by his technical inventions.

We distinguish the first epochs of human history by their
technical character, speaking of the stone age, the bronze age
and the iron age, where an almost unnoticeable transition from
one to the other makes the distinction difficult. The same is
true of what we call historical man, as we find^him first in the
Delta of the Nile, in Mesopotamia, in the great valleys of China
and of India, where the history of civilisation has its origin.
Everywhere the development of technics is the hardly percept-
ible and therefore often forgotten basis of political, social and
cultural change. Nowhere does this technical evolution assume
a revolutionary aspect, never does it appear as a break with the
past. All epochs and all nations in history are equally technical
and therefore none is so in an outstanding sense. That is true
also of Western history as it first appears as a characteristic
unity in the Roman Empire ; it is true of the Middle Ages and
up to the beginning of the 18th century ; but at that moment it
is as if this underground current suddenly broke through the
surface. The curve of development which hitherto had been a
continuously and almost imperceptibly rising straight line,
abruptly takes the form of a parabola becoming steeper and
steeper. Technology begins to become a great revolutionary
power and within the last few decades it has taken the lead in the
life of the Western nations, and even of the wffole world. It has
become the dominating factor of modern civilisation. The
changes which technology has wrought in the last two centuries
are beyond all comparison with those in previous ages. That
is why our epoch is called the age of technics, and why the pro-
blem of technology, unknown to previous epochs, has suddenly
become the most urgent problem of all.

i] ne| problems 3

Why is this so? We might answer this question first by-
pointing to tjie tempo of technical inventions and the changes
created by them. The mad speed of technical progress makes
mankincf breathless; with one invention pressing fast on
another, man cannot get any rest. The growth of technics is
out of proportion to the progress made in other departments of
life, and puts to shame all attempts of society to adapt itself to
the technical change in order to make it useful and beneficent.
It is like what happens when a youth suddenly begins to grow
at a great pace. His spiritual development cannot keep pace
with his bodily growth and therefore there are disturbances.

TECHNlCALEVO!£riON_

YEARS OF HISTORY 4000 3000 2000 I0OO f~ 1000 1800

There is a disproportion between bodily and spiritual growth,
the one taking place at the cost of the other. This comparison,
with its emphasis on the time-aspect of technical evolution, is
certainly legitimate. It is true that technical evolution and
change acquired such a speed that the balance of power within
society was distuned and that the social changes, which would
have been necessary to adapt life to them, could not be made
adequately. We might say that the mushroom growth of giant
cities, with their apparent poverty of structure and their pro-
duction of a mass-society and mass-psychology, was a kind of
surprise-effect produced by lack of time for adaptation. In a
similar way, one can attribute the preponderance of technical
interest in our generation to this speedy development of technics.

4 TECHNICS [LECT.

But such an analysis remains wholly on the surface. More
than that: it falsifies the picture of real history by making the
cause the effect and the effect the cause. This idea of social
adaptation lagging behind technical progress rather hides than
reveals the truth. It is not technics which has created the
modern man, but it is the modern man who has created technics.
The technical man existed before technics. Take as an example
the jnost famous novel hero of the age immediately preceding
the technical revolution, Robinson Crusoe. Compare Robinson
Crusoe with his colleague in suffering, Ulysses. How differently
they face their identical lot of being cast by shipwreck on a
solitary island! There is not much difference, technically,
between Robinson Crusoe and Odysseus. Perhaps the most
important difference is that Defoe's hero, in distinction from
Homer's, has and uses gunpowder. But the main difference is
this, and this is exactly what Defoe wants to show : how Crusoe
masters technically his hopeless condition. This is the inspir-
ing idea which has made the book a favourite of youth: the
idea of the man who helps himself out of the difficulties, the
man who — ingenious in quite another sense than Ulysses — is
capable of subduing hostile nature step by step.

Behind the technical evolution of the last two hundred years
there is a much deeper spiritual process, with which the first part
of these lectures has dealt. This process begins with the Renais-
sance, leading on to the Enlightenment, and beyond it to the
radically positivist secularised man of to-day. Modern technics
is the product of the man who wants to redeem himself by rising
above nature, who wants to gather life into his hand, who wants
to owe his existence to nobody but himself, who wants to create
a world after his own image, an artificial worlc^ which is entirely
his creation. Behind the terrifying, crazy tempo of technical
evolution, there is all the insatiability of secularised man
who, not believing in God or eternal life, wants to snatch as
much of this world within his lifetime as he can. Modern
technics is, to put it crudely, the expression of the world-voracity
of modern man, and the tempo of its development is the expres-
sion of his inward unrest, the disquiet of the man who is destined

i] TRANSCENDING NATURE 5

for God's eternity, but has himself rejected this destiny. The
hypertrophy of technical interest, resulting in a hyperdynamism
of technical evolution, is the necessary consequence of man's
abandonment to the world of things, which follows his
emancipation from God.

Let us return for a moment to those quiet periods which
nobody would call technical, though even then technics had
reached a high measure of development and was incessantly
progressive. What do we mean by " technics "? In th<? first
place, domination over nature, emancipation from its hazards
by intensifying and multiplying the functions of bodily organs.
The hammer and the crane are the fortified fist and the pro-
longed arm, the car is the improved foot, and so on. The whole
of technics is a continuation of what nature has given to man as
his particular character: upright walk. That is why technics
is, as such, a task given to man by the Creator, that Creator who
gave man the upright spine and thereby the freedom of the use
of his hands and the eye directed to infinitude. God wants man
to use his intelligence in order to rise above nature and " subdue
the earth This phrase is found on the first page of the Bible.
It immediately follows that other phrase in which the specific
nature and destiny of man is expressed : " and God created man
in His own image It is not by chance that the second pre-
cedes the first. The task of subduing the earth follows from the
the first. The task of subduing the earth follows from the
nature and the destiny given to man by the Creator. It is most
likely that the author of this first chapter of Genesis was think-
ing of the upright walk of man, but this physical presupposition
of his superiority is the expression of a deeper reason for superi-
ority. Man is called to transcend nature, because he is called to
be godlike. Technics is only one of the forms of nature-trans-
cendence, but it is that which presupposes the others, higher
civilisation and spiritual life.

So long as man does not use artificial means, he remains
dependent on what nature gives, here and now. That is, he
necessarily remains on a low, more or less animal, level of devel-
opment. He is completely at the mercy of natural hazard and

6 TECHNICSjj [LECT.

tied to the moment; he cannot look into the future, he cannot
shape his life, he must live it as nature gives it. By jhe invention
of artificial tools, man emancipates himself to a certain degree
from the dictates of nature. The technics* of housebuilSing and
agriculture make him independent of what nature gives at each
particular time and place. With a roof over his head and four
walls around him, he can defy the weather and live where he
chooses. By agriculture he dictates to the earth what to pro-
duce for him and to produce it in such a measure that he can
store up enough for the future. He makes water or wind
drive his mill He captures the wind in his sail and forces it to
carry him over the seas. The spinning-wheel^ and the loom
make him independent of the scarce animal-skins for clothing.
One by one he cuts the thousand ties by which his body and its
needs are linked to the fortuitous formation and production of
the ground. The development of crafts of all sorts leads to
differentiation of human society and to the specialised training
and development of spiritual capacities ; it leads to exchange, to
the communal life of the city, to communication between town
and town, between country and country. The crafts are at the
same time a preparation for higher arts and, in the form of
artistic trade, they play their part in aesthetic ennoblement.

Technical skill can be learned and, therefore, transmitted
from generation to generation. That is why in this sphere of
life there is an unambiguous and more or less continuous pro-
gress. Each generation learns from the one before and adds
new inventions. In this process of technical education the mind
is trained for methodical work. The multiplicity of crafts makes
for a rich differentiation of the spirit. It cannot be denied that
cities, with their differentiated crafts, are pre-eminently the
seats and nurseries of higher culture and education. All these
organic types of technics — if I may so call them — are easily
forgotten in our age of highly abstract mechanical and there-
fore inhuman technics. But they belong to the true picture
and show the close relation between technics and truly human
civilisation.

Even in this picture of pre-modern technics, however, there

i] DEVELOPMENTS AND DANGERS 7

are traits of* a more sinister quality. Closely related to the tool,
and often expressed by the same word, is the weapon. The
development of crafts almost everywhere gives rise to the de-
velopment of war technics. There are exceptions to this rule,
one of the most interesting being that of the older China, where
an almost unique development of crafts did not lead to a parallel
development of war technics, because war and fighting were
stigmatised, culturally and morally. Not even the invention
of gunpowder, which in Europe had such pernicious conse-
quences, could become dangerous among this peaceful people.
The moral discredit of war was so deep that gunpowder was
never allowed to be used for war purposes, and its dangerous
energy was puffed out in harmless fire-works. But apart from
this most honourable exception, the development of technics
generally resulted in increasingly dangerous weapons and wars.
The Roman technics of roadbuilding was developed primarily
for military purposes. The technics of shipbuilding created the
navy, and so on. Still, all this remained within limits which
prevented technics from being the dominating potential of war.

Another danger to society resulting from technical develop-
ment is the formation of social classes. Technical, like military,
superiority creates differences of property, social privilege and
power. These differences, however, so far as they were con-
ditioned by technics, did not become very dangerous in the
pre-modem ages, because it was not so difficult to acquire tech-
nical skill and technical means. From all this, we can conclude
that on the whole the positive, beneficial aspects of technical
progress by far outweighed the negative or evil ones. In the
" golden age of the crafts " nobody would have thought of
technics as a serious danger or even a problem of civilisation.

All this is suddenly changed with the introduction of machine
technics. It had a sort of prelude in the invention of gun-
powder and its application to warfare. The consequences of
this invention were far-reaching and could give a premonition of
what further similar leaps in the development might mean. It
is strange and somehow shameful that Christian Europe did not
succeed in doing: — perhaps did not even attempt to do — what

8 TECHNICSJ [LECT.

had been achieved by the Chinese. At any rate? with gun-
powder, technics begins to acquire a negative trait pi European
history. But incomparably more revolutionary was the inven-
tion of the steam engine and the locomotive, and later on the
discovery and technical use of electricity and of petrol, the
invention of light metals and the development of chemistry.
Now begins the technical age. As we said before, we should not
look r upon these inventions as the real causes of the technical
revolution; they had to come, because men wanted them. They
had to develop at such an unparalleled rate, because men did not
want to limit their development in any way. Still, once tech-
nics had become what it is now, its effects upoiy the social and
spiritual life of mankind are tremendous.

It has often been said, and it is obviously true, that all the
technical changes which took place in the life of men from the
stone age to James Watt are not nearly as great as those since
James Watt. The life of a farmer or craftsman before the
invention of the steam engine was not so different from that of
Jeremiah's time as from that under modern agriculture and
industry. Machine industry in the broadest sense of the word,
including transport and communication, has changed not only
the life of Europe and America, but that of the whole surface of
the world, in a tempo and in a measure completely unparalleled
before.

This technical revolution has its positive as well as its negative
side. By it man has indeed subdued the earth in a measure
inconceivable before. By the radio he has eliminated distance
completely, so far as mental communication is concerned; by
the aeroplane he has eliminated it almost completely, so far as
bodily communication is concerned. The techniques of produc-
tion are capable of nourishing, clothing, housing every inhabitant
of this earth in more than sufficient degree and with almost
complete certainty. Hunger and want are no more inevitable.
That they are still amongst us is entirely conditioned by
political, social, international power-relations, preventing the
reasonable use of technical possibilities. Medical and hygienic
techniques would be sufficient to create everywhere conditions

i] ADVANCE|NOT " PROGRESS " 9

of life whic&t would guarantee to a high degree a healthy life
and development of the child and double the average age of
man. The invention of cinema and radio, perfecting that of the
printing-^ress, allows an almost unlimited spreading of cultural
assets. In a measure then, present day technics places at the
disposal of man the means which would safeguard a high stan-
dard of life and give access to cultural advantages to everyone
capable of understanding and valuing them. Technical man-
kind has a superabundance of all things needed, and a super-
abundance of means to transport them wherever they are
needed. If there were no war, if there were only just and reason-
able laws, if all men were well-intentioned, technics would
provide, so it seems, almost a paradise. The technicians can
claim that it is not their fault if, at this hour more than ever
before, mankind presents features of the utmost misery and the
most unworthy conditions. All this is meant by the phrase
" technical progress ", which up to recent years was used without
hesitation. It seems as if technics — and particularly modern
technics — was an indisputable gain for mankind.

Why is it, then, that nobody at this hour uses that word
" progress " without hesitation, if at all? Let us be clear that
there is no such thing as " technics in itself The production
of a cannon is a technical affair, but at the same time it is the
expression of a certain political and military will. The pro-
duction of dangerous narcotics is a matter of chemical industry,
but it serves purposes which are medically and morally unsound
and pernicious. Technics, therefore, is never purely technical.
It always stands in the closest connection with the totality of
social and cultural life and of man himself. "Technics" is
an abstraction which does not exist. There are only men
workin^technically for certain purposes. When modern man
conceived the idea of redeeming himself and making himself
master of his life by technics, he did not know or divine that
such technics would have results of a very different order.
What, then, are those effects of the technical revolution which
an increasing majority of modern men abhor?

Modern technics does not mean merely a fantastic extension

10 TECHNIC| [LECT.

of man's power over nature: it also means millions of men
working underground, uncounted millions of men massed
together in soulless giant cities ; a proletariat without connection
with nature, without a native heath or neighbourhood; It means
asphalt-culture, uniformity and standardisation. It means men
whom the machine has relieved from thinking and willing, who
in their turn have to " serve the machine " at a prescribed tempo
and in a stereotyped manner. It means unbearable noise and
rusbr, unemployment and insecurity of life, the concentration of
productive power, wealth and prestige in a few hands or their
monopolisation by state bureaucracy. It means the destruction
of noble crafts with their standards of quality and their patriar-
chal working conditions; it means the transformation of the
farmer into a specialised technician of agriculture, the rise of an
office proletariat with infinitely monotonous work. It means
also the speedy standardisation of all national cultures and the
extinction of their historical originality. It means universal
cliche-culture, the same films and musical hits from New York
to Tokio, from Cape Town to Stockholm, the same illustrated
magazines all over the world, the same menus, the same dance-
tunes. It means the increasing domination of quantity over
quality, not only in production itself but also in the formation
of social, political and international power.

Above all, there are two phenomena in very recent times
which, like devilish monsters, rise from that progressively
technified mankind : the modern totalitarian state and modern
technical war industry. It cannot be said that the totalitarian
state is the necessary product of technics, but its relation to
technics is obvious. Without modern technics the totalitarian
state is impossible. And the tendency towards totalitarianism
lies within technical evolution: mechanisation, centralisation,
mass-men. Modern war industry, however, is the direct pro-
duct of modern technics. Let us remember it is not the techni-
cians that are guilty, but man who has abandoned technics to
itself, incapable of bridling its development, putting technics
without hesitation, and, as if driven by necessity, at the service
of his political power-aims, This war machinery displayed its

ij . triumpeJ of THE MACHINE II

terrifying force in the first world war. The second world war
manifested i^s increased destructive force; but since then there
has come that last step or leap : the use of atomic energy, which
means a*sudden increase in the capacity of annihilation without
analogy in the previous history of technics. Now the develop-
ment of technical warfare has reached the point where nothing
is impossible to it. Mankind for the first time faces possible
universal suicide.

This is the other, the dark side of the picture. It shows Tiow
dangerous it is to speak of technics in abstracto. One could
have known from the history of technics that every technical
advance does not change merely man's relation to nature, but
also man's relation to man. Every invention is an increase in
power, and every increase in power within society is a danger to
its balance and order. This fact could remain unnoticed so long
as technical progress could be assimilated socially and ethically.
It is the tragic fact of modern history that the technical revolu-
tion took place at a time when mankind was in a process of social
dissolution and ethical confusion. It was the era of progressive
secularisation and mass-atheism, when all ethical standards were
relativised and men became metaphysically and ethically home-
less. Cause and effect mutually interpenetrate each other. We
have already seen that modern technics could not have developed
without a certain spirit of rationalism and secularisation. It is,
however, equally true that secularised humanity was not socially
and ethically equal to the technical revolution. Only a society
which was incapable of subordinating the profit motive to higher
motives, a society which was ethically, and even aesthetically
callous and enfeebled, could allow the growth of those soulless,
ugly, giant cities, with their speculative building and their
proletarian quarters. Only such a society could watch without
protest the dissolution of all natural community, and accept as
inevitable the development of modem war technics.

In this connection we have to point out grave fault on the part
of the Christian Church. The Church ought to have been on the
watch-tower. She ought to have seen what was going on behind
those beautiful slogans of freedom and progress. The Church

12 TECHNIC^ [LECT.

might have been expected to protect men from enslavement and
from becoming automatons. The Church ought £o have seen
that in such conditions, which upset all the order of creation,
the preaching of the Gospel became almost illusory. Is it not
shameful for the Christian society that Confucian China was
capable of suppressing the military use of gunpowder, while the
Christian Church could not prevent, and did not even try to
prevent, the development of a war machinery incomparably
more dreadful?

European industrial history is not altogether devoid of
indications of what might have happened if modern industry
had developed within a truly Christian society. I am thinking
of a certain phase in the industrial development of Great Britain
and Switzerland. Within a few decades of the invention of the
steam engine these countries experienced a physical and social
devastation within the working population which was definitely
alarming. But then moral and religious forces reacted and
were called to the defence. By social legislation, by the trade-
union and co-operative movements, and by something like an
awakening of social consciousness through prophetic personali-
ties, much of the damage was repaired in a comparatively short
time. What had been called technical necessity proved quite
unnecessary. The technique of fabrication, so often regarded
as being beyond ethical control, was effectively put under such
control. Many things remained bad enough, but yet the effect
of this ethical-social reaction against the technical materialistic
laissez-faire gives us a faint idea of what could have been avoided
if society had awakened in time to the ethical dangers of so-
called progress.

Nobody can say how far the disease of uncontrolled, unassimi-
lated technics has progressed already, whether the disease has
reached* the point where it becomes incurable or not. It is our
duty, however, to open our eyes to the imminent threat to life
and to do whatever we can to make technics serve human ends.

The nature of technics is to place at man's disposal the means
for certain purposes. Of course, the production and use of
technical means is in itself a purpose, but it is never a Selbst-

ij MEA'ffS AND ENDS 13

zweck, an ultimate purpose. It is essential to the health of a
society that this order of ends and means should be known and
recognised, so that technics as the sum of means is subordinated
to man's life. Where the means become more important than
the end, where technics becomes autonomous, a social disease
develops, which is analogous to cancer: autonomous growths,
not useful but injurious to the organism, which develop in-
dependently of the organic centre and finally destroy the
organism. When, for instance, a country rejoices over the
growth of a city of millions of inhabitants, this is as stupid as if
someone were to rejoice over the growth of a cancer. Giant
cities are merely symptoms, but they are obvious symptoms of
autonomous technical growth which finally leads to destruction.

The positive meaning of a human civilisation depends on this
subordination of means to ends. The reversal of this order,
therefore, results in civilisation becoming inhuman and finally
perverted. For this reversal of the order of ends and means,
which produces a demonic autonomy of technics, secularisa-
tion is more to blame than technics. It is because the world
and its goods become to men more important than God, eternal
life and love, that men throw themselves into the production of
material goods with that passion of which the human soul,
destined for infinitude, is capable. Technics was merely the
means by which this insatiable desire for material goods could
be, or seemed to be, stilled, because technics is capable of un-
limited development. Once brought into action, this process of
unlimited increase and expansion could no longer be controlled.
The machine invented by man began to control man's will;
whether he liked it or not he had to obey the logic of technical
development. I4 was exactly as in Goethe's symbolic ballad,
Der Zauberlehrling, about the spying apprentice who had found
out his wizard master's magic word which summoned obedient
spirits to his service. For a while he revelled in the service of
the water-carrying spirits; but before long he became afraid,
because the spirits could no longer be controlled, so that by their
very service the poor apprentice was in peril of being drowned —
Die ich rief, die Geister, werd ich nun nicht los — a catastrophe

14 TECHNIC{ [LECT.

from which the master's intervention saved him. *This is very-
like our situation, Man has learned to control tfce immeasur-
able powers of nature. Modern man dominates nature to a
degree unthinkable in previous ages. But whilst man controls
nature by technics he no longer controls his own technics, but
is more and more dominated by it and threatened with
catastrophe.

Last century saw the climax of technical enthusiasm and of
belief in progress by technics. It was then that people hoped
technics would relieve man of all impediments and troubles
connected with his body. " Our saviour is the machine ran
a sentence in a German newspaper. This enthusiasm for
technics can still take hold of peoples whose technical develop-
ment has lagged behind that of Western Europe. It can de-
velop the more where the ground is prepared by secularist
thinking which recognises only earthly and material goods. In
Western Europe, however, this enthusiasm has been followed by
disillusionment, deep despondency and fear. The first part of
the story of the Zauberlehrling is finished. The second part is
in full process and, since the invention of the atomic bomb, is
approaching its climax.

Such disillusionment and despair might bring about a real
turn of the pendulum in the right direction, but only if man is
capable of understanding something of the deeper causes of this
fatal, automatic development of technics, if he comes to see the
false order of means and ends — that is, secularisation, loss of
faith in God and in eternal values — as the root of the whole
matter. All other proposals to make technics subservient again
to human ends, and all attempts to heal the damage to social
and personal life produced by the technical revolution, are mere
palliatives. I do not mean that they are worthless, they may
even be necessary, as the treatment of symptoms — such as
fighting the fever — is often necessary until more radical therapy
can begin. But unless there is a basic conversion, technics will
develop as before, and the tempo of its development will not
decrease but increase, because nowadays men not only make
inventions but have found the technique of making inventions.

ij THE CHRISTIAN ANSWER 15

For this reason, all corrections coming from outside always come
too late. The crazy tempo of technical revolution can only be
reduced to a degree which is socially and personally supportable,
if the whole scale of values of European nations can be changed.
As long as material values indisputably take the first place, no
change for the better is to be expected.

The perversion of the order of means and ends was caused by
the decay of the consciousness of personality. And this in its
turn was the consequence of the decay of Christian faith. In
our time many have come to see, and are ready to admit, that
moral values ought to be put in the first place. This insight is
good, but not sufficient. Mere ethics has never displayed real
dynamic. You cannot cure a demon-ridden technical world
with moral postulates. In contrast to mere ethics and morality,
Christian faith has the dynamic of passion, of surrender and
sacrifice; it is capable of turning men to the eternal end, of
unmasking demonic sin and thereby banning it, which no
enlightened education is capable of doing.

Technics in itself is no problem for the Christian man. As
long as technics is subordinate to human will, and human will
is obedient to the divine will, technics is neutral, and as a means
of goodwill is itself good. From the Christian point of view,
there is no reason to condemn the machine and to return to the
spinning-wheel. Even the use of atomic energy is not in itself
harmful or bad. But we can hardly avoid the question whether
technical evolution has not already passed the limits within
which it is controllable by feeble, mortal men. This question
cannot be theoretically decided. It is a question of the real
dynamic. For us the only important question is whether man-
kind is ready, 03^ may become ready, to perform that inward
right-about-turn which alone will correct the fatal perversion of
the order of means and ends.

II

SCIENCE

IF we are to ask what is the most characteristic feature of our
epoch, we might wonder whether it is science or technics
which gives the distinguishing mark to our time. "Whilst
to-day there is an obvious dependence between science and
technics which makes the latter appear as allied science, it
should be clear from the start that the unprecedented revolu-
tionary development of technics in the middle of the iSth
century had very little to do with science. Technics does not
have its roots and origin in science, neither is it the scientific
spirit which gave modern technics its incomparable dynamism.
Technics springs from the will to dominate nature and to extend
the power of man. If we are aware of this character of technics,
it may become very doubtful whether it will be science or tech-
nics that will win the race that is taking place between the two
in our time. It does not seem altogether impossible, or even
improbable, that science may come more and more under the
domination of technics, which is to say that the independent
quest for truth may be transformed into a quest for the useful,
as has already happened in countries where technocracy has
become the state religion.

Whilst technics has been in existence in all times and in all
countries — since man cannot but prove himself as homo faber —
science is a late-comer in human history; and yhilst all civilised
nations of olden times reached a high standard of technics, there
are only a few of them that have produced science. Technics
originates from the necessities of life ; it is, so to say, vitality in
the realm of intellect. Science, however, in its essence is a
decidedly non-pragmatic, " disinterested 99 activity, and for that
reason much more spiritual than technics. It originates from
the will to know the truth. A certain amount of suspicion is

THE, SYNOPTIC VIEW 17

aroused whep, in a particular epoch, natural science holds the
field unchallenged by any competition; for this may be an
index that the interest in truth is already displaced, or at least
biassed, *by the technical will to dominate nature. What
legitimises Greek science so unequivocally, and proves its
nature as a pure science, is, first, the almost complete
absence of any attempt to apply scientific results technically;
and in the second place, the astounding parallelism in the
development of the Geisteswissenschaften alongside of natural
science. In this sense, the Renaissance may be called a true
rebirth of the classical scientific spirit. In spite of a simultaneous
sudden growth^of technical interest, the Renaissance scientists
were moved by a pure will and a magnificent passion for know-
ledge of the truth; and some of this purely scientific impulse
was preserved until quite recent times. Again, this is proved by
that astonishing parallelism in the development of the Geistes-
wissenschaften alongside, and in competition with, natural
science.

This may be the right moment to draw attention to a peculiar
linguistic fact which is not without importance from the point
of view of spiritual history. Neither the French nor the English
have a common word including both natural science and
Geisteswissenschaften. History, literature and linguistics do
not come under the heading of sciences but under that of arts
or letters. Psychology and sociology are classed with philo-
sophy, and jurisprudence stands by itself. The German mind
has had the courage to make the concept of science cover all
these fields of investigation, evidently because that which is
common to all of them — the quest for truth — has been felt to be
more important jhan the differences. This synthetic or synop-
tic view includes both obligation and danger: obligation to
scientific rigidity and objectivity, and the danger of a false
application of the categories of natural science within the field
of Geisteswissenschaften. In itself however, this synthetic con-
cept of sciences is a precious heritage of the best Greek scientific
spirit and an invaluable pointer in the direction of pure science,
which does not " squint " after practical use — a heritage which

l8 SCIENCE [LECT,

in the epoch of technics (when science is in danger of being
completely dominated by usefulness) cannot be preserved too
jealously.

Science takes its orders from truth ; that is its deep, you may
even say, its religious pathos and ethos. It is not by mere chance
that in the period of positivist philosophy an attempt has been
made to divert science from this orientation to truth and to dis-
credit the very concept of truth. Even in the sphere of pure
science — physics and even mathematics — the idea of usefulness
or expediency was substituted for that of truth. The laws
found by physics were no longer " true " but merely " expedi-
ent" formulations. It is one of the most gratifying develop-
ments within this most revolutionary science of our days that
this compromise with the pragmatic mind of the time has been
shaken off, and so the temptation to betray the purity of the
scientific mind has been overcome. Science has decided to
remain in the service of truth and not to exchange truth for
expediency. This decision must have the most far-reaching
consequences.

Our era, however, has made us familiar with even more
dangerous possibilities. The dynamic heir of positivist philo-
sophy, the totalitarian state, has taken hold of science and
succeeded in making it serviceable to its own purposes : science
has to take its orders from political power. It has to start from
its ideological presuppositions and has to prove that they are
correct. Whether these are the racial philosophy of the Herren-
volk, or the Marxian doctrine, makes no difference. In both
cases it means the prostitution of science, which" in the long run
would mean its end. For a science robbed of its freedom, a
science to which certain methods, axioms an& results are pre-
scribed, has ceased to be science ; it is a mere caricature of science.
The versatility, however, which so many scientists showed in
letting themselves be won over for this new course, shows more
clearly than anything else that science has its ethical pre-
suppositions without which it degenerates. It is dangerous to
speak of science in the abstract. There is no science, there
are only men who do scientific work. Science therefore is a

Il] SCIENCE AND TRUTH ig

part of human life. That is why science has its ethical pre-
suppositions.*

Truth j:s a severe and jealous mistress. She suffers no squinting
to the left or to the right, she demands unconditional faithful-
ness. There is a scientific discipline which is much more a
matter of character than of intelligence, there is a scientific con-
scientiousness for which the control of others is a poor substitute.
Maybe a scoundrel of genius might achieve important scientific
results, but he will do so only because he fits in with a structure
of methods, standards, checks and tests which are produced and
applied by a multitude of other scientists who are no scoundrels.
It is true that personal ambition has played, again and again, an
important role within the scientific process. But, where it is
not controlled and checked by the capability and willingness to
sacrifice personal prestige for the sake of truth, it has proved a
severe hindrance to scientific progress. On the other hand, one
of the most awe-inspiring traits of the true scientist is his will-
ingness to acknowledge as erroneous what hitherto he has
maintained as true, the willingness to subordinate personal fame
to objectivity. Whilst it is true that ambition is a powerful
stimulus of indefatigable research, the greatest achievements of
science do not spring from ambition. They are the result of a
genuine passion for truth. Again, the attempt has been made
to substitute for this passion for truth mere curiosity. Cer-
tainly, curiosity is an important motive within the field of science.
But taken by itself it is not sufficient to explain all the sacrifices,
self-discipline and persistence which alone produce the great
scientific achievements. Likewise it is impossible to explain in
terms of egoistic motives the mutual trust between scientists
which present-day scientific organisation makes necessary. Only
the one who feels himself pledged to truth, is himself capable of
trusting his fellow scientists, and he alone will prove capable of
attaining the highest measure of scientific productivity. With-
out this practical idealism, without the genuine love and
reverence of truth, science is doomed to sterility,

In our days this deepest spring of the scientific spirit is hidden
by an immense scientific mass-organisation. Thousands of

20 SCIENCE [LECT,

researchers are combined within a colossal plan of ^co-operation
and division of labour, for the purpose of developing our know-
ledge of nuclear processes. It is obvious that only a minority
within these thousands are inspired by a genuine scientific ethos.
The whole thing looks like an enormous business which the
individual worker might easily exchange for another one. What
is true of this specific section of physics is true to a certain extent
of other branches of science. Organisation seems to take the
lead. But, if you look more closely, you can easily observe that
even this enormous " big business " within science is unthinkable
without scientific ethos. You simply have to imagine that the
majority of those taking part in these organisations are moti-
vated by mere egoism, and devoid of all truthfulness and con-
scientiousness, to see the complete impossibility, in such
conditions, of fruitful co-operation towards one end. Further-
more, it remains true even now : Wenn Konige bauen, haben die
Karmer zu tun, x i.e. it is the great individual scientist and not
the organisation which does the pioneer work. After all, science
remains the domain of the great solitary truth-seekers who,
like Kepler, Galileo and Newton, are moved and inspired by a
sacred reverence for truth.

It was St. Augustine who made the first attempt to relate the
idealism of truth to the Christian idea of God. From the point
of view of a genuine Biblical theology, Augustine's system
may not be altogether sound, being a synthesis of neoplatonic,
pantheistic speculation with revealed God-knowledge. His basic
idea, however, that the God of revelation is the origin of all truth
had to be accepted even by Biblicists like Luther and Calvin.
Whoever says " Truth says " God It is the common con-
viction and tenet of all Christian theology thatchere is no other
truth — whatever its content — than truth in God. Why is this
so?

The first affirmation of the Christian creed is : "I believe in
God the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth True,
this first sentence, like the rest of the Christian creed, is spoken on
the basis of God's revelation in history, in Jesus Christ. The
1 When Kings build — carters must work.

n] god's immanence 21

source of thi| knowledge of the Creator is the same as the source
of the knowledge of God the Saviour. The first part of the Chris-
tian creed is not a sentence of natural theology. The Christian
knows the Creator primarily not from creation but from His
Word. However, it is the specific character of this first part of
the creed that its content includes objects of our natural know-
ledge — Heaven and Earth — which as such are also objects of
scientific investigation. God has created that nature, the fo/ms
and laws of which Natural Science investigates. He has created
that man, body and soul, who is the common object of Natural
Science and Geisteswissenschaften. He has created men and
world in such away that man is able by his God-given reason to
know the world — and it is his God-given destiny to know it.
Moreover, God has created the world and is immanent and
present in it in such a way that man, in knowing the world,
cannot but know something of God's power and wisdom. Know-
ledge of whatever kind, if only it is true knowledge, is therefore
never something merely natural and worldly; being the act in
which something God made is grasped according to divine
destiny, it is in itself something holy, sacred. In so far as true
knowledge exists, it is always at the same time natural and
supernatural.

That is, from the point of view of faith, the reason why know-
ledge of truth, even the search for truth, has in itself that deep
"pathos and ethos" which we find present in all genuine
scientific research, and which we find, before all, a dominant
motive with the pioneers of science. Therefore all science could
be, and ought to be, a divine service, a reverent following the
traces — lineamenta, as Calvin says — of God's creation. Behind
the postulate of*scientific objectivity we find nothing less than
awe in the face of God's order. What the scientist discovers are
materialisations of God's thought and will. Man is not mistaken
but supremely right if he feels science to be a high, divine
vocation closely linked up with his human dignity, a sacred
cause which requires surrender, loyalty and obedience, a duty
which is laid upon him and which he cannot forsake arbitrarily.

If we understand science in this fashion there can be no

22 SCIENCE [LECT.

conflict with faith. It is the same God who has created this world
which we penetrate by our scientific endeavours, arid who reveals
Himself in history. The revelation of God in His V^oxd does
not make scientific research unnecessary or unlawful. The
Word of God in Scripture is no divine text-book of astronomy
or anthropology. God's revelation in His Word is given to us
by men who lived in the pre-scientific ideas of their time. On
the a other hand, no science can ever hope to give us what God
reveals in His Word, because the world can never disclose the
secret of God's gracious Will, forgiving man his sin and pro-
mising him eternal life. Science and faith are on different
planes, perhaps we may say on planes standing vertically at right
angles to one another, and having therefore merely a common
intersecting line. The revelation in Christ takes place in that
world which science investigates, but this revelation cannot
become an object of science. Therefore it is equally stupid not
to believe in God for scientific reasons and to oppose science for
reasons of faith. The battle between Christian theology and
science, which has aroused so much bad feeling between the two,
has proved to be a mutual misunderstanding, caused by an over-
stepping of limits, partly from the side of faith, partly from that
of science. In principle this problem does not exist any longer,
though in practice it may never cease to bother us.

But the world in which we live and which we know is not
simply God's creation, because we ourselves are not simply the
men whom God created. Between God's creation and ourselves
lies a gulf, a catastrophe which Christian faith calls the fall of
man into sin. Even the scientist within his own sphere experi-
ences the repercussions of this catastrophe. He does so in his
ever-repeated experience that the scientific rmn accomplishes
his service of truth less faithfully and reliably than he ought to,
that he is often led by motives which are unfavourable to the
knowledge of truth. Egoism, vanity, lust for power, partisan-
ship of all kinds, are well known to have played an important
role in scientific life. But the effects of sin within the scientific
world are even deeper, so that they are hidden from moral
commonsense. Man as a sinner is estranged from God, and so

Il] SCIENCE AND SIN 23

his sense of truth is poisoned at its very root In the same place
where St. Pai|f speaks of God's revelation in His created Work, he
also lays his finger on this sore spot, that man in his sinful
illusions tonfounds creation and Creator. He calls God what is
not God. He absolutises what is not absolute. Again — and this
is the aspect which is most important in the history of science —
he simply forgets God and ignores the divine truth. All these
possibilities, of which we have merely sketched an outline,
have been realised in scientific progress and played fatal rofes :
false absolutes — we might call them the pseudo-scientific myths
— relativism, the illusion of positivism, that is, independence of
all metaphysics^ From the Christian point of view all these are
equally manifestations of the one deep perversion of the mind
which must pervert and deflect the course of science.

With the last remarks we touch upon the problem which the
German calls scientific Voraussetzungslosigkeit, i.e. the postulate
that the scientist must have no presuppositions. If by that we
mean that scientific investigation must not be tied to any pre-
conceived results but has to be completely open to the facts, what-
ever the facts may be, this postulate is identical with the idea
of scientific inquiry as such. It is the postulate that science
takes its orders from truth. But if by that postulate we mean
to say that the scientist, in order to be a true scientist, must not
have religious beliefs, such an axiom proves to be a mere pre-
judice which has nothing to do with science. This kind of
Voraussetzungslosigkeit, just as the similar idea of indifference
to value, is neither possible nor desirable.

For the scientist it is no gain but a loss if he does not believe
in truth, the quest for which is a sacred service. That prac-
tical idealism which makes the scientist capable of sacrifice,
that deep religious " pathos and ethos " which, as we have seen,
is the characteristic of the greatest pioneers of science, is a potent
motive and a directing force. It is the best, and perhaps the
only sufficient, guarantee for an unconditional, genuine search
for truth, and therefore for true scientific progress. Let us
remember how, in the era of positivist philosophy, the substitu-
tion of utility for the idea of truth has endangered scientific

24 SCIENCE [LECT.

activity. Much more do we see, in our era of technocracy and
totalitarianism, how destructive the effect of utilitarianism and
the loss of scientific ethos must be. There is, however, no truer,
no purer " pathos and ethos 99 than the one which flows 6ut of the
Christian idea of God. Only those who cannot grasp the pro-
found difference between faith-knowledge and scientific know-
ledge will believe that Christian faith anticipates replies to
scientific questions and thereby destroys the necessary openness
of file scientific mind.

But the positive contribution of faith to science is more than
that. On closer inspection that metaphysical Voraussetzungs-
losigkeit or " neutrality " or " indifference whi^h the positivist
postulates, is no real possibility. He who does not believe as a
Christian cannot help believing in something. That assumed
neutrality proves to be a phantom, something which neither is
nor can be. The metaphysical dimension of the mind never
remains empty, but must always have a content. If it is not the
Christian faith, then it is some kind of alternative metaphysics
which is much more dangerous for science, being unconscious.
Metaphysical neutrality simply does not exist, because neutrality
in itself is a kind of sceptical metaphysics.

It is not surprising, then, that during the last centuries, when
rationalistic philosophy and materialism took hold of the
Western mind, we see within the field of science the appearance
of certain axioms which seemed to be self-evident, but which
were nothing but hidden, unconscious metaphysics: partly
idealistic, partly materialistic. Such an axiom was the pan-
causalism of the 18th century, the idea of Laplace, of a universal
world-mechanics. A similar axiom took hold of the 19th cen-
tury science: pan-evolutionism, i.e. the extension of the
Darwinian principle of selection to the totality of phenomena,
particularly to history. In general, we see a tendency to apply
certain categories, which have proved helpful and even necessary
in certain areas of science, to others by the sheer impetus of a
monistic conception of Truth and Being. Wherever Christian
faith was alive, these tendencies were powerfully resisted, but
this was the exception, the movement of the time going in the

Il] THE ERROR OF THE "OPEN MIND " 25

opposite direction. At no time has this pseudo-scientific,
monistic t^pdency dominated in a more dictatorial and
uncritical way than in the era of positivist philosophy under
the disguise of the slogan of metaphysical neutrality. What
presented itself as metaphysical neutrality was, as a matter of
fact, blunt naturalism, not to say stupid materialism: a pre-
conceived axiom of the unity and uniformity of all phenomena.
Of course this is metaphysics, metaphysics of the worst type.
Instead of a true openness of mind not prejudicing the character
of Being, we have here a metaphysical dogma of the uniformity
of all Being, which proved to be genuinely harmful in the field of
Geisteswissenschaften and contributed no little to the sad con-
dition of the present world. I only mention a naturalistic
sociology which abolished the notion of justice and introduced,
instead, the principle of the survival of the fittest.

The postulate of the Voraussetzungslosigkeit proves to be mis-
leading also from the point of view of epistemology. No science
can work without Voraussetzungen (in Greek: hypothesis).
Science gets answers only if it asks questions, and questions are
alternative presuppositions. True scientific openness of mind
does not consist in having no presuppositions but in having
intuitively the right presuppositions in the form of questions or
hypothetical answers. Only where the right questions are
asked, that is, where the right hypotheses are intuitively intro-
duced into the field of research, is new knowledge gained.
Natural Science failed to progress as long as it was dominated by
Aristotelian categories taken from the realm of man. On the
other hand, where man and his history are subjected to the
categories of Natural Science the results will be meagre, and in
part pseudo-scientific. It so happens that man is different from
his surrounding nature. Similarly, whoever were to use merely
mechanical presuppositions in his study of organic life, would
miss his object, because it so happens that the mechanical and
the organic are different. Whoever works with a preconceived
dogma of the uniformity of Being cannot but do wrong to some
part of reality.

If once the false metaphysics, lying at the root of this monistic

26 SCIENCE [LECT.

conception and the axiom of metaphysical neutrality, is seen as
erroneous, the road is open for a further insight w|dch throws a
new light on the importance of Christian faith for true science.
I am speaking of the knowledge of man, who is evidently a very
specific, unique object of knowledge. He is unique for the
reason that he is at the same time both the object and the subject
of that knowledge, being the subject of all knowledge and science.
Man is not merely one amongst the objects, because all know-
ledge, everything which we know of the world and nature, has its
seat within man's mind. If I am not mistaken, it is exactly the
most objective of all sciences — mathematical physics — which has
reached a point where. this indissoluble connection of subject
and object has become evident in an overwhelming manner.
Amongst all objects, man is the one who is always both object
and subject at the same time. That is the deeper reason why
the so-called Geisteswissenschaften, since they have to do with
human history and the products of the human mind, have a
structure so different from Natural Science that, as we have seen,
Frenchmen and Englishmen prefer not to call them sciences.

The more deeply we penetrate into the being of man, the more
clearly does it appear that the specifically human — that which is
his alone — is the fact that he transcends himself. What we call
culture is a product of man's self-transcendence. So is science.
Man wants to know the truth; that truth reveals itself to him
only in parts, in fragments, and therefore he must remain critical
with regard to the results of his investigations; he must be ready
to correct them. The mainspring of all this self-criticism is his
passion for absolute truth; not a single fragment of knowledge
is gained, as Planck has reminded us, if absolute truth is not
aimed at. All science lives on this perspective of absolute truth.
It is by this perspective that we can say : this is merely relatively
true. Whoever says " relative must first have said " absolute M .
This is the self-transcendence of man as it manifests itself in
science.

Now, the most important manifestation of this self-transcend-
ence is that act by which man transcends not only all he knows,
but his very being, in subjecting himself to the judgment of

n] man's self-transcendence 27

ultimate truth. That he does this is one thing, how he does it
is another. "\|Tiich is that Truth to which he subjects himself
in the totality of his being? This question, inevitable as it is,
carries us beyond the range of mere knowledge into the sphere of
faith. It cannot be answered without personal decision. The
Christian believer does this in a manner different from the rest.
The truth to which he subjects himself and by which he feels
himself judged is unique in two features : in the radical nature
of this judgment and in its thoroughly personal character. The
believer knows that only by knowing God truly, does he know
himself truly. That is why the Christian believer has a know-
ledge of himself different from all the others : he knows himself
as a creature which is responsible to the Creator, and which at
the same time lives in contradiction to his God-given destiny.
Furthermore, he knows himself as a creature whose destiny it is
to live in the Divine Love offered to him in the revelation of
Divine Truth.

It is easily understood that the exploration of human history
and of the specifically human manifestations, such as language,
culture, state, law and so on, must lead to different results
according as the explorer uses as his working hypothesis this
Christian conception of man, or does not use it. Within the
scientific process he uses this Christian view of man merely as a
working hypothesis, ready to correct it, if his object makes it
necessary. But the conflict between him as a believer and as a
scientist never takes the form of an ultimate alternative, because,
it so happens that the Christian view of man proves itself to be
the only realistic one, that is, the only one which stands the test
of experience and does not falsify the picture of human reality.
Whilst it is true that the Christian view of man gets its accurate
form only in the^rocess of critical scientific research, and many
of the traditional formulations have to be sacrificed, it proves
itself a key, opening doors which remain closed to any other.

The Christian conception of man produces also a certain view
of the place of science within the totality of human existence,
namely that science, however important, has no legitimate claim
to the first place. Science knows what is, it does not know what

28 SCIENCE

ought to be. Science is a part of human destiny, but it is not
this destiny itself, simply because it refers to wl$at is and does
not refer to what ought to be. Science is human, but it is not
the human. Isolated from the totality of human destiny, or
put into the first place dominating the rest, it kills the human
centre, making men inhuman. It destroys personality, respon-
sibility and love. Science is not bound to have this fatal result;
it does have this result only if it usurps the first place, which does
ntft belong to it.

Speaking in general, science in our day claims more room
within the totality of human life than it is entitled to. Instead
of serving, it dominates ; instead of subordinating itself, it wants
to subordinate the whole of life; that is why it has, in part,
dehumanising effects. This is not the fault of science, but of
man misunderstanding the function of science and giving it an
importance which it should not have. It is not from science
that we have to learn what is the task of man and what is the
meaning of his existence. These are questions which lie outside
the range of science, in the sphere of faith. Science is related to
truth, but science is not the only way to truth. What science
can know is a certain aspect of truth. The all-including Truth
is God, and God is not an object of scientific knowledge. He is
not an object at all, being the absolute subject, the one who has
destined us, created relative subjects, for Himself and made us
responsible to Him. Being the absolute subject, He never can
be grasped by us. If we know Him, it is because He reveals
Himself to us. When this happens — when the light of His
truth enlightens and grasps us — then we begin to understand
Him as the meaning of human existence and as the source of
that deep " pathos and ethos " which is the life of genuine
science.

Ill

TRADITION AND RENEWAL

CERTAINLY nobody would claim that our age is suffering
from an overemphasis on tradition. Since the struggle
against the ancien regime, particularly since the French
Revolution, the western world has undergone a process of dis-
solution of tradition. The one example of England, however,
proves that it is not merely the inertia of the forces then released
which accounts for the continuation of this process. England,
too, had its revolution, but after its successful accomplishment,
the life of this island people re-established continuity with the
previous tradition and never lost it in the following centuries.
Within the rest of the western world there were always forces
acting in an anti-traditional sense after the removal of the
ancien regime.

The main force was rationalism. Continental Europe and the
United States have experienced the effect of enlightenment much
more deeply than Great Britain. Rationalism, the principle of
enlightenment, is anti-traditional, for tradition does not belong
to those "clear and perspicuous ideas" in which, since Descartes,
the enlightened individual believes. The main argument of
tradition — it was so, therefore it shall remain so — is offensive to
modern man. What he cannot justify here and now in the light
of reason does not put him under any obligation. The motive
force of equality also works in the opposite sense from that of
tradition. We people of to-day are equal to those who were
before us. Therefore we have as much right to decide for our-
selves what shall be and what shall not be, as they had in their
time. By their reason men are essentially equal and alike.
That which is unlike is unessential and should not be considered
as essential. So tradition has no precedence over what seems to
us better to-day. Tradition is essentially an aristocratic and not a

30 TRADITION AND RENEWAL [LEGT.

democratic principle. In a world in which democracy, in the
sense of equality, has become a kind of religion! tradition can
neither be kept nor be formed. This is one of the main causes
of the instability of western society during the* last two
centuries.

For tradition, rightly understood, plays the role of a firm
scaffolding amongst the forces which create and carry the cul-
tural life. Tradition means continuity, the element of duration
antl of persistence. The Latin word, tradere, means " to pass
on " ; those of the older generation pass on to the younger what
they have received themselves. Tradition is inheritance, first in
the very banal economic sense. Where there p no passing on
of material values from father to son and grandson, there tradi-
tion in a spiritual sense will hardly persist. Culture presupposes
continuity within its material foundation. Where the State by
death duties and other taxation destroys this material continuity,
it will also in the long run destroy the sense of spiritual tradition.

Tradition is, so to speak, cultural memory, the living preser-
vation of the past in the present. Therefore tradition and the
historical sense are closely connected. Where there is no love
for the past, living tradition becomes impossible. The two merge
imperceptibly: the passing on of historical memory and the
passing on of values from the past generation to the coming
generations. In order to pass on what has been, one must know
it. Behind both, historical interest in the past and the passing
on of values from the past, there is the same conception of the
unity of the generations across the change of time, the solidarity
between the present and the past. Only where the past is con-
sidered as ours — as something which belongs to us just as much
as that which shall be to-morrow — can these two elements
coexist : reverence for what past generations have done and the
consciousness of guilt. To acknowledge guilt means to consider
the past as a living presence. Where tradition and historical
interest become weak, the consciousness of guilt also becomes
weak.

With these reflections we have already touched the Christian
view of tradition. The principle of tradition is deeply rooted in

Ill] CHRISTIANITY AND TRADITION 31

the Christian |Conception of life. The connection with those
who were before us is guaranteed by the idea that all mankind is
bound together with solidarity in creation and in sin. All of us
are one in " Adam We cannot forget that " Adam's "
creation and destiny are ours. We cannot disconnect ourselves
from " Adam's " guilt. All mankind has a common inheritance
of creation and of sin. In the Christian message history is of
capital importance. It is not surprising, then, that tradition, is
the very essence of the Christian Church. Paradosis is one of
the key words of the Bible. To pass on what God has done and
given to the previous generations is one of the most sacred duties
of the Old Testament community. The Roman Catholic Church
is right in affirming the capital importance of tradition. It is
not on this point that the Reformation broke away from it;
the break took place on the question whether or not the New
Testament should be the norm of this tradition. But, in any
case, the Christian Church lives by the passing on of historical
revelation. The Church is a living continuity of past revelation,
across the change of time.

Because the Church in her very essence is holy tradition, she
also is the legitimate guardian of all natural and cultural
tradition. This function she exerted, though imperfectly, in
that epoch of tremendous break-down, when the Graeco-Roman
cultural tradition was about to be lost. She performed the
same function of guardianship throughout the Middle Ages, in
the Greek Orthodox Churches and in the Churches of the
Reformation, passing on the cultural inheritance at a time when
respect for the past was already vanishing. Certainly Christi-
anity shares the credit for this with the Renaissance Humanism,
which in a more direct manner restored the continuity with
antique culture. It is customary to attribute to Renaissance
Humanism rather than to the Christian Church the chief merit
of having given classical antiquity its legitimate share of modern
European civilisation. Upon closer inspection, however, we
shall see two things : first, that Renaissance Humanism showed
its strength not outside but inside the Christian stream of life;
second, that this Humanism fell a prey to rationalism and

32 TRADITION AND RENEWAL [LECT.

finally decayed in proportion to its alienation f ror^L the Christian
tradition. Humanism kept its cultural vigour only where it
remained in contact with Christianity, for the decisive element
of tradition, i.e. loyalty to the heritage of the past, does not lie
within the principle of Humanism as such, but in the Christian
view of history.

This apparent paradox may be illustrated by a fact of lan-
guage. During the whole of the Middle Ages until the end of
die 17th century, the Latin language was the universal means of
communication between European nations. Whoever had a
claim to education spoke Latin. In our present era of Babel-like
confusion of language we look back upon thi/ time with envy.
Why is it that this living connection with antiquity was broken?
There may be many answers to this question, but there is one
which seems to have more truth than others, namely that the
Humanists with the Ciceronian Latin of the scholars killed the
medieval Latin which the Church had made the universal means
of communication. Had we kept it, we might be capable now
of breaking the national linguistic barriers, as was the case when
Englishmen, Frenchmen, Italians and Spaniards followed the
Latin lectures of the German, Albertus Magnus, at the Sorbonne..

Tradition is not merely keeping alive the spiritual heritage of
the past. Even more important, because more closely connected
with the personal and social character of man, is the continuity
of social values, such as custom, law, civil institutions, family
tradition, public spirit and virtue. We understand best the
tremendous importance of social rootedness and stability if we
start from its opposite, as it is represented in a large modern
industrial city. Already the outward picture of such a modern
mushroom growth, compared with a city of (Ad cultural tradi-
tion, is characteristic. One cannot refrain from expressing the
contrast in terms of " mechanism " and " organism There is
nothing more ugly, soulless and inhuman on the face of this
earth than a gigantic mushroom-city built up by the accidental
conflux of large masses at a place of industrial opportunity. It
is like a giant city of brick barracks entirely dominated by the
principle of bare utility, of mere " lodging without any form,

Ill] NEED OF A COMMON LIFE 33

without the wiljl to express togetherness and community, without
any attempt to express outwardly an inward conviction. You
can " make 99 such a city of barracks, but you cannot " make " a
city of culture ; it must grow, and grow slowly. What such a city
of a million lodgings tells you is this : here are masses of men
whirled together by the blast of economic opportunity, each one
a detached individual without any connection with the others,
without anything but the bare necessity of making a living jo
hold them together. There is no chance for the growth of a
real community life because there is nothing in common. The
inhabitants are all alien and indifferent to each other. There is
no common histof y, there are no common memories, no common
heritage, no common origin. Next year you may just as well
live in any other similar city. Such a city has no character
whatever, no individuality; it cannot rouse any feeling of
loyalty. How could you love this city? Why should you feel
tied to it? Why should you feel that you belong to it and that
you all belong together? Nobody would say with pride : " I am
of this city. It is my city. I am its citizen

Such a city, then, is the expression of a life without tradition.
Tradition is social rootedness, living togetherness, on the basis
of common history, of family acquaintance through many gene-
rations. Tradition is for men in general what the house of the
parents is for the child. As a child cannot develop normally
without family life, so men cannot become truly human without
tradition, without growing into the life of past generations.
Certainly man is created to be an individual personality. This
is the law of the Creator. But just because it is so difficult to
become a person, he needs the support of the community, and
that means rooteciness in, and contact with, generations preced-
ing us and sharing with us their mature experience. You do
not place a new-born child in the street, telling him now to look
after himself. In a way man always remains a child. He never
becomes independent in an absolute sense. He always lives
from that which others have learned, thought, experienced and
created before him.

Uprootedness does not mean independence. On the contrary,

34 TRADITION AND RENEWAL [LEGr,

the uprooted man can never become independent. He is pre-
destined to become a mass-man, a particle of a collectivist
mechanism, an object of the totalitarian state. The decay of
tradition during the last few generations is one of the most im-
portant presuppositions of totalitarian collectivism. It has
created the mass-man, just as the deforestation of the Mississippi
Valley has created the sandy- soil of the " dust bowl which the
stprms blow into heaps and then disperse. It is not the huge
size of city populations which creates the mass-man, it is the lack
of a common tradition.

It is not modern technics which is the main cause of social
deracination, but a conception of life which has ceased to value
tradition, that rationalism which has no relation to the past but
sees life merely as a series of independent presences. Paradoxi-
cally, man who has no past has no future either. Man, to whom
tradition is sacred, plants trees and creates benefits for the next
generations ; because he has part in the past, he looks prudently
into the future. The uprooted mass-man cares for neither past
nor future. He lives — as we say in German — in den Tag
hinein; he does not save, but spends what he has. He does
not bother what becomes of his work, he does not love durable
things, he loves change, and duration seems to him tedious. It
is only reverence for the past which makes you love things which
last. That is why our age is so incredibly unstable. The sense
of stability has been destroyed. The value of duration is dis-
credited by a philosophy of incessant change. How should one
who has been taught that only the new is good, and who has
never been taught the value of old things, love that which
endures?

For the Christian, the valuation of tradition^ primarily based
upon the belief in God's order of creation and preservation.
Was unset Gott erschaffen hat, das will Er auch erhalten. 1 The
created order of the family, as an expression of divine will, is the
foundation of all tradition. The family is based upon fidelity
and loyalty between successive generations. The divine com-
mandment "Thou shalt honour thy father and mother" is

1 What God has created he will maintain.

the Magna Carta of all true tradition. This commandment,
on the other ftand, presupposes that the older generation takes
the responsibility for the coming one. The chain holding
together the generations and so forming tradition is woven of
respectful gratitude and far-sighted responsibility. The fifth
commandment is, however, only part of the divine law. This
law, standing above the change of time, guarantees stability
against change. The same law which has bound the old, binds
the young. That is why it is written on stone tables. It is
meant to last for ever. Where the sense of the divine law as the
basic order of life is alive, you need not be concerned about the
power of tradition. Even within those nations to whom the
divine law and order of creation were only imperfectly known,
but who were loyal to what they knew, the continuity of tradi-
tion was solid and the chain linking the generations proved to
be unbreakable. The divine order of creation and the divine
law formulating it are the basis of natural tradition.

But now tradition, fundamental as it is, is not solely a positive
value in the life of mankind. Es erben sich Gesetz und Rechte
wie eine ew'ge Krankheit fort (Goethe). 1 The stable element
can dominate in such a way that it kills. Life is renewal and
human life, in particular, is creation of the new. Man is distin-
guished from animals just by the fact that he creates new things ;
that he does not repeat the same melody throughout the cen-
turies, but invents new songs; that he does not reproduce the
same pattern like the bee and the beaver. The element of
creativity is inseparable from spirit and culture; it is new know-
ledge, new invention, the creation of something which has never
been before. In order to create the new, one has to be independ-
ent of the old. pne needs courage, love of adventure, to sail into
the unknown dangers of the open sea. Here is the field for the
pioneer who is not afraid to stand alone, to swim against the
stream and to take a course hateful to the mass of those who are
bound by tradition.

Nay, is not living tradition in itself renewal? Was Du ererbt

x Law and rights are handed down from generation to generation l&e a
never-ending disease.

r>

go TRADITION AND RENEWAL [LECT.

von deinen Vatern hast, erwirb es 3 um es zu besitzen (Goethe). 1
Living tradition is not merely transmission but a deceiving and
giving which on both sides is creative. Every live teacher is
somehow an artist who, by teaching, releases the sleeping powers
of the pupil, while a live pupil does not merely receive, but by
appropriating forms something new. When tradition becomes
mechanical reproduction, it is neither alive nor human.
Genuine tradition is creative appropriation which in itself
is ^progressive transformation. Live individuality cannot
appropriate without giving, stamping with its own stamp.
Appropriation means reception into the organic whole, which
in itself is unique.

The creation of new things is necessary because what has
been reached up to now is only a step on the long road to a
distant end. The capacity to transcend himself, which is the
very essence of man, is founded in the idea of perfection and
absoluteness, with regard to which every achievement appears
as a mere approximation which cannot ultimately satisfy. The
restless reaching out after the new is not grounded merely in a
desire for change but in this striving for the perfect and absolute
which dwells in the human mind. The more inexorably each
achievement is measured by the norm of perfection and absolute-
ness, the more alive is the spirit. The spirit is thus living in the
unrest of a "not yet". This is the dynamic of the idea of
progress. It might appear, then, that the intensity with which
the idea of progress has moved the modern mind is a sign of the
spiritual vitality of our age.

This would really be so if that " not yet " were the true expres-
sion of our relation to the perfect and absolute. This superficial
evaluation of our human situation is, however, exactly that false
optimism which was the reproach of the past century. To see
our reality from the view-point of " not yet " is an optical illu-
sion. Not only is our life not yet good, not yet human, but
rather no more good and no more human. It is not merely
incomplete with regard to the perfect, but it contradicts it.
This statement does not apply to all spheres in the same

1 What thou hast inherited from thy fathers acquire it so as to possess it.

Ill] THE CHURCH AND TRADITION 37

way. There are things which are imperfect or incomplete.
The category of contradiction — or opposition— is meaningless,
say, in the sphere of technical problems. The first locomotives
were really imperfect compared with the present ones. In this
sphere there is unambiguous progress. The same is true,
although not in the same measure, of scientific knowledge.
Science proceeds from the imperfect to a more and more perfect
condition of knowledge. 'However, the category of "not yet"
becomes most problematic in the moral sphere, and it becomes
entirely wrong where the moral condition is viewed in connection
with our God-relation. Our relation to God cannot be said to
be "not yet" g^od. From the point of view of faith it is
clearly " no more " good, that is, it is placed in the category of
opposition or contradiction. Sin is not mere imperfection but
deviation, opposition to the will of God, even destruction of the
God-given status. The more man's understanding of himself
becomes personal, the more the category of " not yet " becomes
irrelevant. The fact of " opposition " is central, and progress
is an unsuitable category in the Christian understanding of
man's relation to God. Where man's true being is understood
as communion with God, the judgment on our actual being is
this : loss of communion, separation from God by sin and guilt.
The only possible solution of the human problem is the restora-
tion of the destroyed communion by forgiveness and salvation.

With the message of redemption in Christ and of ultimate
salvation, a completely new element enters human life which
also entirely reshapes the relation of tradition and renewal. The
restoration of God-communion is perfected in Christ. We look
back upon it as something past. " It is finished ", once and for
all. The knowledge of this divine achievement is entrusted to
the Church, that she may pass it on from generation to genera-
tion. This passing on — this traditio — is her very essence and
life. Church is tradition. On the other hand, what the Church
passes on is something perfecdy new, the unheard of novelty of
divine forgiveness, gratuitous love and the promise of final sal-
vation and perfection. The content of the Christian message
and tradition are those things which "eye saw not, and ear

38 TRADITION AND RENEWAL [lECT.

heard not — prepared for them that love Him Jesus Christ is
the " novissimum " of all history which cannot be derived from
anything preceding, but which also remains the "novissimum"
throughout all history. He is the end of all history, its trans-
cendent goal; to believe in Him means also to believe in a new
heaven and a new earth. "Behold, I make all things new", says
He, who is the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end.

iThat is why Christian faith, wherever it is genuine, is not
merely a power for progress but a revolutionary force in history.
Faith in Christ, in the One who started a new history, is at the
same time renewal of human existence here and now. Christian
faith is inseparable from new birth, from being a new creature.
" Wherefore, if any man is in Christ, he is a new creature : the
old things are passed away; behold, they are become new."
This newness bursts asunder all continuity of tradition. Such
novelty is not merely an improvement but a perfect revolution,
a revolution of thought and will. In the New Testament the
patterns of continuity are rejected in sharpest antithesis. The
new man is opposed to the old man in blunt contradiction. In
a radical right-about-turn man must break with the old and turn
completely towards the new. Christian existence is radically
revolutionary, being the expectation of the perfectly new world.

But what, then, of the necessity for tradition and conserva-
tion? We have to distinguish between centre and periphery.
The New Testament faith is radically revolutionary in the centre,
that is, in its relation to God and to men, but it is not at all
revolutionary in the periphery. Neither Jesus nor the Apostles
attack the state or the social order with the intention o£ replacing
them by another order. Not even such an immoral institution
as slavery is directly questioned. The revolution takes place at
first in the personal centre only. This emphatic distinction
between centre and periphery is such a marked feature of the
new life in Christ that at first sight the community of early
Christians might appear to be utterly conservative in the politi-
cal, social and cultural spheres. If we recall, however, that little
jewel of the New Testament, St. Paul's letter to Philemon, we see
that this conservatism is merely apparent. This letter was

Ill] RENEWAL THROUGH CHRIST 39

addressed to a member of the Christian Church in Colossse,
recommending its bearer, a fugitive slave, to his master. Whilst
St. Paul takes the institution of slavery for granted, he trans-
forms it from within into a relation of brotherhood. A silent
revolution takes place in the personal centre and from there
transforms the social relationship.

We cannot understand such a relation between centre and
periphery unless we bear in mind that the renewal through
Christ is at the same time the restoration of the primeval gdbd
creation of God. Through Jesus Christ the image of God in
man, which has been destroyed by sin, is restored. By the silent
revolution the ejreatureliness of man is not ascetically negated,
but completed or fulfilled. Nowhere is this more clearly to be
seen than in the element which is so decisive for tradition:
marriage and the family. Marriage is not denied but fulfilled
through Christ by being made a symbol of the unity between
Christ and His body. In a similar way the institution of the
family is not dissolved but transformed from within by being
made a symbol of the paternal filial relation between God and
man.

This is to say that the radical revolution within the invisible
centre creates a silent revolution in the visible periphery, not by
changing laws, institutions and orders as such, but by inwardly
transforming them and giving them a new meaning. That is
why the most revolutionary force of world history manifests
itself under the disguise of a conservative attitude. It is exactly
by being so radically revolutionary, that it takes a conservative
appearance. The Christian knows that all changes which begin
from without are no real changes. For, after all, it is always
man who makes the conditions and not the conditions that make
men. Outward revolutions are therefore at bottom fictitious,
much ado about nothing. Of course the world does not believe
this. For the superficial mind, which fails to understand the
real relation between centre and periphery, the silent revolutions
always are too slow and not radical enough. It is only by
becoming a Christian that a true valuation of the really revolu-
tionary forces is gained; the secularised mind will always

40 TRADITION AND RENEWAL [LECT.

overestimate outward appearance and underestimate radical,
inward change.

The true revolution, even within the social, political and
cultural spheres, is always that which takes place within and
seems to be conservative without. Certainly, there is a danger,
lest the principle of inwardness become a mere disguise of
unreality. This danger is, however, inseparable from the life of
faith. Faith in the grace of God is always liable to be taken as
a pretext for moral sloth and inertia. This, however, is not the
fault of faith, but of its being misunderstood. Misunderstood
faith can use the principle of inwardness as a disguise for a false
conservatism, which preserves the present ordGr not because of
its element of divine creation but merely for reasons of personal
privilege. All these misunderstandings cannot undo the truth
that genuine faith, Math its silent revolution, is an incomparably
more radical transforming power than outward reformation and
revolution.

This primacy of the " silent revolution " which is implied in
the genuinely Christian distinction of centre and periphery does
not, of course, exclude drastic action with a view to changing
outward conditions and social structure. But two things will
always distinguish the Christian from a secular revolutionary.
First, structural changes will never be given first place because of
their ambiguity and ambivalence. Though the motive behind
them may be truly Christian, they may work out in a very
different direction. The best of laws may create the worst of
results if handled by men of evil spirit. Second, the Christian
will not be in favour of outward changes before the situation is
" ripe " for them. Otherwise such changes may produce more
confusion than good, and, if they are not prepared from within,
they will not last or will last only by tyrannical enforcement.
That is why those social changes, which are the result of Chris-
tian motives, are more of an organic than of a violent nature.
Radical as is the break between the old and the new in the centre,
the change in the periphery — in outward conditions and
structure — takes on rather the character of slow growth. Great
Christians were never " revolutionary " in the ordinary sense of

Ill] CHRISTIAN AND SECULAR REVOLUTION 41

the word. The " revolutionary principle " in this sense is much
more the product of equalitarian lationalism than of Christian
faith. It is radically opposed to tradition whilst, in the Christian
view of things, a high valuation of tradition is paradoxically
united with an incessant push to renewal

Modern man, who has emancipated himself from God's order
and usurped the rights of God, has also made for himself the
claim: "Behold, I make all things new". Having somehow
become omnipotent in his dominion over nature, he thinks him-
self able to throw overboard all tradition and to create a
perfectly new order according to his own design. This new
order, however? always carries the stamp of technical rationality.
As he overlays nature with his man-made, artificial second
nature, by technical civilisation, so he also substitutes for already
slowly developed culture an artificial, planned civilisation, which
is as ugly and inhuman and destructive of real creativity as those
mushroom cities of the late 19th century.

Christian faith alone is capable of combining tradition and
renewal, because it is based upon the unity of God the Creator
and God the Redeemer. Tradition alone leads to petrifaction ;
renewal alone leads to dissolution, artificial planning and tyran-
nical centralisation. The Christian faith affords the possibility
and necessity of both : of reverent preservation and continuity
and of radical change and indefinite growth. Both are equally
necessary for a truly human civilisation.

One last thing must be said. Whilst it is true that the Chris-
tian faith lives by paradosis, by handing over the Gospel truth
to every new generation, it is equally true that this handing over
creates real living faith only where this tradition is capable of
renewal itself. -The Gospel truth is the same throughout all
centuries. But the human interpretation of this truth must be
new in every new epoch, and the forms in which this tradition
takes place must be different, according to the times and cir-
cumstances. Mere traditionalism is the death of the Church,
just as mere revivalism is its dissolution. So it is in the Church
itself— in its functioning as the means of veritable tradition
and renewal — that this duality of conservation and reformation

42 TRADITION AND RENEWAL

has to take place. As a matter of fact, it is not two things but
one thing. The Church has to give the world the living Word
of the living God. It is by His living Word that God preserves
the world, and it is by His living Word that He renews the
world. Where this Word is alive and preached as a living Word,
and where it is received in real faith, it cannot but do both:
preserve what God wants to have preserved and renew what God
wants to have renewed.

ft is this mysterious unity of tradition and renewal which is
the only hope in a world in which false conservatism and false
revolutionism have brought about a tension which spells disaster.
To enter into that mysterious unity of traditioirrand renewal is
the meaning of the old and much abused word, conversion.
And it is there where the mere exposition of thought has to stop
and the decision of the individual has to come in.

IV

EDUCATION

THE cultural level of a country is often judged by the
measure of education of its population. What is educa-
tion? There is an aspect of education which is not
specifically human. We know the adequate and at the same
time touching Ssertions of animals in training their young ones
in the arts of their life. Human education is a continuation of
these exertions, by which the older generation introduces the
younger generation into the habits and arts of their own life.
Human education, then, is a form of tradition; its purpose is to
pass on the experiences of the earlier generation, their convic-
tions of what is necessary to life, their conception of values and
standards, their habits and practices, and to train those who
come after in all these. The subject of education is primarily
the community : in the first place the family, but also the clan,
and finally the political community. Education, like all tradi-
tion, is in its essence an activity of the community. In primitive
societies education ends with a rite of reception into the com-
munity of the adult, by which act he now becomes responsible.

It was an event of revolutionary importance when Socrates
for the first time proclaimed as the true purpose of education
individual independence, spiritual self-reliance. His maieutic
method aimed, as the name indicates, at simply drawing out, or
bringing to the light of the day, what is hidden in every man.
He therefore questions the principle of education that had been
dominant hitherto, namely, its character of tradition. The
Socratic teacher does not pass on; he does not give, but wants to
make the pupil independent of anything given and of any giver.

The idea of education as evolution, development, was thus
discovered. But this new individualistic idea was never accepted
— either in the time of its first prophet, or later on — to such a

43

44 EDUCATION [LEGT.

degree as to displace the older idea, with its basis in social tradi-
tion. On the contrary, the Socratic method of education always
remained an exception. The material weight of the things to be
passed on and the necessity of social tradition was so great that
the Socratic element of education was always confined within
narrow limits.

All the same, there was even in the traditional idea an element
somehow akin to the Socratic method, namely, the element of
training, the development of those capacities and skills which
seemed useful to the community. Training is different from
passing on. Its aim is individual mastery. After all, even the
act of passing on, of tradition, contains at bottom an element
which we might call Socratic; appropriation of what is to be
received. Wherever tradition is alive and not mechanical, this
element of individual, active appropriation must be present. On
the other hand, the Socratic idea has its limits. The mind or
spirit cannot be educated or formed without offering it certain
materials for self-active appropriation. The Socratic ideal was
based on the a priori elements of that which dwells in the mind,
and is therefore independent of history. Socratic education
evidently has a rationalistic, anti-historical leaning.

It is obvious that Christianity introduced into the world an
idea of education which — at first sight — is completely opposed
to that of Socrates. In the Christian conception the historical
is everything, the a priori nothing. Christianity is in itself para-
dosis, traditio, of historical revelation. Something divinely given
has to be passed on. Furthermore, Christianity is essentially
social. The individual has to be fitted into the Christian com-
munity and finally — and this seems to be the sharpest opposite
to Socrates — the aim is not the self-active spirit or reason, but
the acceptance of something given which is beyond reason. The
victory of Christianity, then, seemed to carry with it — in its idea
of education — the complete denial of the Socratic idea.

This was so much the case that even in the moment where
western education began to emancipate itself from Christian
leadership — i.e. in the Renaissance— this fundamental opposition
was not yet felt. The return to antiquity did not take place at

IV] THE SOGRATIC ELEMENT 45

first in the direction of individual independence or autonomy,
but as an appropriation of the antique cultural values as distinct
from the Christian ones. Education was, in fact, so entirely
conceived as passing on, that at this time the question was
merely: what is to be passed on? It seemed to be possible to
take over the cultural heritage of antiquity without thinking
independently for oneself. But the masters of antiquity could
not but create a spirit of independence and the courage^ of
thinking for oneself. It could not be long before the specific
character of Socratic education was rediscovered, and the idea of
education as the development of the indwelling germs of the
individual mirftl was given first place. Descartes' Discours de la
mithode, with its regress upon the a priori certainties, and
Leibnitz's Monadology, with its principle of the monad without
window, gave the Socratic idea a new philosophical and meta-
physical weight. Lessing's treaty, Die Erziehung des Men-
schengeschlechts, is important in two respects. First, Lessing
is the first modern thinker who understood the whole history of
humanity from the point of view of education, divine education,
thus showing the way to Herder and German idealistic human-
ism. Second, Lessing tried to combine Christian revelation
with the Socratic idea of education. He interpreted divine
revelation as being a means of accelerating the development of
the a priori possibilities lying in man's spirit. It was, however,
Rousseau who, for the first time and in the most comprehensive
manner, applied the Socratic ideal to the education of children
and youth, and thus even surpassed Socrates. With Herder the
idea of education as Bildung, i.e. organic development of all
inward possibilities lying within man's nature, is magnificently
based upon a universal conception of history. All human
history is but one great process of spiritual development.

What German humanism since Herder understands by
Bildung has no parallel in any other country or language. That
is why the word cannot be translated. By a grandiose synthesis,
Christianity was combined with the Socratic idea of education.
What Goethe, Schiller, Humboldt, Fichte, Schleiermacher and
Hegel understood by Bildung is a synthesis of historical tradi-

46 EDUCATION [LECT.

tion or communication and Socratic self-development. The
product of this synthesis is the truly gebildete Persdnlichkeit.
This gebildete Persdnlichkeit, the highest point man can reach,
is an individual in whom all latent possibilities are fully
developed by the appropriation of that which is given to him
from outside, from nature and history. The whole wealth of
historical heritage, of antiquity and Christianity, is here con-
ceived of as a means of education. Education itself, however,
is 'understood Somatically as self -development. History plays
the r61e of the Socratic teacher. It is the stimulus that brings
forth the development of inner wealth. Contrary to the rather
polemic attitude of some of these thinkers with regard to Chris-
tianity, the decisive influence of Christian personalism appears
in the fact that the idea of personality dominates within this
system of education. Goethe's confession hochstes Glilck der
Erdenkinder ist dock die Persdnlichkeit is not only his, but that
of the whole classical epoch of German idealistic humanism.

Within this conception of Bildung, the idea of education has
outgrown the limitations within which it was confined up to
Lessing. Education understood as Bildung is not a process
which is completed by reaching the age of maturity but one
which only then comes to its own. Bildung is the real life of
the man who is spiritually awake. It is the very essence of
humanity to become a truly gebildete Persdnlichkeit; it is the
highest aim towards which man can strive, according to the
Orphic word: "Become what Thou art". Education gains
here a new meaning of immeasurable width and depth. Man
is a microcosm containing and reflecting the macrocosm. He
can and shall appropriate to himself the totality of nature and
history. At the same time nature and history are meant to
become united in his personality.

The idea of Bildung in German idealistic humanism is cer-
tainly one of the grandest and most beautiful achievements of
the human mind. Although it was the life programme of a
small ilite, and although it was so ambitious that it could be
shared only by men of high culture, it has exerted a great in-
fluence. From this ideal, the renewal of the German university

IV] THE IDEA OF Blldung 47

(for which the newly created University of Berlin was the model)
took its start. The schools of secondary education followed its
example. The enthusiasm and the deep sense of responsibility,
with which in this epoch the reform and extension of popular
education were tackled, have their origin in the impulses which
came from the spiritual heroes of Weimar, Jena and Berlin.
The role which this spirit of education played in the national
awakening of the German nation, leading to the War of Libera-
tion against Napoleon, cannot be ignored. The influence which
this powerful and high-minded philosophy exerted, far beyond
the German frontiers, is well known. It had even a political
effect in the democratic movement of 1848, which was unfortu-
nately crushed by Bismarck.

All the same it was not by chance that in the political, as well
as later in the social competition of forces, this movement came
to an early end. The ideal of Bildung was, as we have already
mentioned, too exclusively fitted to a spiritual elite and could
not be adapted to the requirements of the common man. This
is the decisive limitation of idealistic humanism. It was an
educational ideal for spiritual heroes; it could never become
popular. The adaptation of this conception of education to
primary schools and family education proved to be impossible.
It is true that the school programmes, with a few phrases origin-
ating from this realm, proclaimed beautiful things about the
development of the total personality. As a matter of fact, in the
real school education these phrases remain on paper, whilst
actual education and training follow quite different, more
practical, lines.

Fortunately, there existed and still exists another much older
idea of education, which is capable of being the basis of all, even
the most popular, education : the Christian idea. This Christian
idea of education, however, was never clearly conceived and
worked out. In the Church of the first centuries, Christian
education was limited to baptismal instruction, containing the
elements of Christian doctrine and ethics, combined with family
tradition. How this Christian family tradition and ethics grew
up we do not know. We do know, however, that it must have

48 EDUCATION [LECT.

been very efficient in the first centuries, because otherwise the
continuous growth of the Christian Church could not be under-
stood. Christian personalities were trained who stood the test
of life. The Christian idea of education was not worked out,
because obviously this was not necessary. The passing on of
Christian doctrine and morality, and the training for Church
and family life, were sufficient. The first part, doctrinal
instruction, was performed according to the didactic rules
prevalent in the synagogue and in existing schools. The
second part was performed, so to say, instinctively.

The same is true, more or less, of the Middle Ages. For the
simple Christians the catechism and Church distom seemed
sufficient. For the more ambitious, there were the higher and
highest schools of learning with their combination of Christian
theology, philosophy and liberal arts. But for both, the simple
people and the spiritual ilite, a large part in education was
played by the Sacraments, which accompany the whole life from
birth to death, and which at that time were observed daily. No
doubt, the Church of the Middle Ages did a tremendous work
of education by its religious apparatus and by its effective en-
deavour to permeate the whole of life by its sacramental prac-
tices. No wonder, then, that in this epoch the conflict between
Christian theology and the Socratic idea of education did not
become acute. The lack of a formulated Christian idea of educa-
tion was covered by the actual educational work of the Church.

This lack, however, became much more dangerous in the
Churches of the Reformation. Here the sacramental training
and Church habits were reduced to a minimum. On the other
hand, preaching and teaching the doctrine of the Bible was
pressed almost exclusively. These two facts together created an
enormous educational vacuum. Whilst in theological know-
ledge the New Testament origins of Christianity were redis-
covered, it was almost completely forgotten that the original
Christian Church was before all a living community, that the
Holy Spirit worked primarily by means of communal life, and
that at that time the younger generation received their Christian
influence and instruction not merely through preaching and

IV] ROME AND THE REFORMATION 49

teaching but through training in Church life. The educational
vacfuum, which became more and more obvious, is primarily due
to the lack of capacity and even of endeavour on the part of the
Reformation Churches to develop a Christian community life.
Certainly, there exists a considerable difference between
Lutheran and Calvinistic Churches. Calvinism, and even more
the sects deriving from Calvinism, have paid much more atten-
tion to the formation of living communities than the Lutheran
and even the Zwinglian Churches, where the identification of
Church and civic community worked in the opposite direction.
But the tendency towards orthodox intellectualism developed
the same vacuum even within the Calvinistic Churches. The
orthodox intellectuals' emphasis on doctrine is the main cause
of the educational vacuum of Protestantism.

It is true that the intellectualist misunderstanding of faith —
identifying faith with belief in doctrines — was a tragedy in
the Christian Church, that had already begun in the second
century. But up to the time of Protestant orthodoxy this fatal
onesidedness was compensated to a certain extent by intensive
ecclesiastical training and habit. Whilst the Reformation in its
centre was the rediscovery of the non-intellectualist conception
of faith, this new discovery was lost all too soon in the fight
against the Roman heresy. The Reformation Churches became
orthodox. The old intellectualist misconception of faith became
dominant again, but was now much more dangerous than in the
Catholicism of the Middle Ages, because all those compensatory
elements, by which the Church of the Middle Ages had covered
its bareness, were now lacking. Once Church doctrine, theology
and catechism had acquired their almost monopolistic position,
education was reduced to theological teaching. No doubt, even
within Protestantism, Christian custom played its role and
Christian training was an element of family life. But these
elements were secondary and not sufficiently connected with a
truly- evangelical community life. The resentment against
Roman Catholic training resulted in discrediting training as
such.

We have to mention another factor of great importance — the
fight of Reformation theology against the opinion that man

50 EDUCATION [LECT.

could co-operate with God in things of faith led to a conception
of revelation which stood in opposition to the Socratic idea.
Orthodox theological doctrine, as expressed for instance in some
Lutheran Confessions, interpreted in mechanical terms the
exclusive divine activity in the conversion of men. The active
element of appropriation was eliminated. If you study the
classical catechisms of the 16th and 17th centuries, which in
many respects are masterpieces, you will see that the activity of
the pupil is reduced to a minimum. The doctrine that the
human mind to which faith is imparted is a truncus et lapis, has
devastating effects upon teaching. The ordinary catechism
instruction is an educational monstrosity.

From this point of view, the Socratic revolution, beginning
with Descartes and leading on to German idealism, was an
historical necessity and an indubitable gain. Here the pupil is
at last taken seriously as an active factor in learning. Against
the background of orthodox passivism, one can understand the
tremendous impression made by the educational ideas of the
1 8th century, and also the energy and passion with which the
orthodox system was attacked. Protestantism, in spite of its
priceless Biblical insight, has led to an educational debacle
which would have become much more apparent had not the
revival of teaching in the 18th century and 19th century been
carried on in the name of Protestantism.

Up to the present day, the Christian idea of education has not
been fully worked out. In that respect, Reformation theology,
even in its best forms, has proved unsatisfactory, because it was
never capable of combining the necessary Socratic element of
active appropriation with the Christian conception of divine
revelation. There are, however, two great exceptions to this
negative general statement, two thinkers at least who have made
most valuable contributions toward a Christian idea of educa-
tion : the great Swiss educator, Pestalozzi, and the great Danish
Christian thinker, Kierkegaard.

In general, Pestalozzi has been misunderstood as being a
follower of Rousseau and of German idealism, though, as a
matter of fact, the basis of his pedagogical system is emphati-

IV] MODERN SECULARISM 51

cally Christian. It is true that Pestalozzi took over from
Rousseau the idea of self-development, and worked out his
pedagogical message according to the Socratic principle of
development of the germs lying in man. In that respect he is
at one with the main trend of the time. On closer inspection,
however, we see an unbridgeable gulf between Pestalozzi's
guiding principles and those of Rousseau and the German
humanists. This appears already from the basic fact that the
central idea in Pestalozzi's system is the Christian idea of lo^e.
Education for him is education in love and for love. He is in
complete disagreement with his contemporaries, and in complete
agreement witk the Christian tradition, in putting the main
emphasis on the education by the family, particularly by the
mother, and in subordinating all education to the one belief that
men become human by living in the love of God and in loving
communion with their feUow men. Again he is thoroughly
Christian in emphasising the dignity of manual work and the
unity of man's body and spirit. Pestalozzi, in spite of his ideal-
istic terminology, is a Christian prophet of humility, social
responsibility, and life in prayer, deeply rooted in Biblical
revelation and tradition. He has learned whatever was to be
learned from his idealistic contemporaries and their idea of
Bildung, but the basis of his instruction is neither Rousseau nor
German idealism but Biblical faith.

It is greatly to be regretted that the Christian Church and
theology were prevented by intellectualism from understanding
the unique importance of this first great Christian philosopher of
education, and that they left it to the epigoni of German human-
ism to develop and to propagate Pestalozzi's ideas in & direction
foreign to the intentions of the master. A genuine Christian
conception of education could have been gained from Pestalozzi,
or at least developed, for he was the first thinker who had tried to
combine the Socratic idea of self-development and spontaneous ap-
propriation with the Christian faith in divine revelation. After
what we have seen about the fatal misunderstanding of ortho-
doxy in the matter of appropriation of divine truth, we certainly
cannot seriously blame Pestalozzi for lacking in orthodoxy.

...ii

52 EDUCATION [LECT.

It may seem rather astonishing that we should speak of Soren
Kierkegaard in this connection, because this great thinker does
not seem to have been very much interested in the problem of
education. We are justified, however, in mentioning him here,
because the dominant problem of his philosophy is the relation
between the Socratic conception of learning and Christian faith
and because his main interest was the truly active appropriation
of the Christian message. Hence, we can understand his sen-
tence : " The subject is the Truth This sentence, expressing
better than anything else what he was after, is not an expression
of romantic subjectivism, of Fichte's philosophy of the " Ego
nor of Cartesian rationalism; it is spoken simply*out of his con-
cern for genuine " existential " faith as distinguished from
orthodox belief in a creed. Kierkegaard, however, has met with
the same fate as Pestalozzi: the Church and the theologians
failed to understand him.

Kierkegaard's doctrine of the paradox, of the scandal, of the
existential character of faith, has certainly exerted considerable
influence on recent theology. But his doctrine of appropriation,
which is at the root of all his dialectic, has not been understood,
has not even been noticed. So far as Protestant theology is
concerned, it did not fit in with the conceptions of sin and grace,
as they were formulated by Reformation theology. The doctrine
of sola gratia did not seem to leave room for Kierkegaard's con-
cern for active appropriation. Protestant theology is still
dominated by a mechanistic conception of God's activity in
conversion. And this is precisely why Protestantism up to this
hour has not been able to develop a Christian idea of education,
and to relate Christian faith to the different spheres of
autonomous cultural life.

In their time, the Reformers had tried to solve this problem
by making a distinction between Christian revelation on the one
hand and secular science and arts on the other. By this simple
distinction they were capable of combining with their theology
a rather generous estimate and use of cultural values of the
Graeco-Roman civilisation. In spite of Luther's fight with
Erasmus and of Castellio's expulsion by Calvin, all the great

IV] EXISTENTIALISM AND FAITH 53

Reformers were also humanistic admirers of classical antiquity.
This is particularly true of Zwingli and Calvin. Whilst their
theology differed greatly from that of the humanists, they
shared with them not merely their love of Greek and Latin, but
also their high estimate of classical literature, poetry, philosophy,
political science and science in general, so long as the question
of free will did not interfere. But they left unsolved or even
untouched the problem, to what extent Christians could and
should learn from the pre-Christian pagan masters and left
undefined the limit of what was or was not admissible. We
certainly cannot blame them for not being capable at the same
time of reforming Church and theology and of solving the
problem of the relation between Christianity and secular
culture. They had undoubtedly done enough ; their followers,
however, did not have the necessary calibre to tackle the task
which the great masters had left behind. On the one hand,
they turned back to the medieval synthesis; on the other hand,
they developed a narrow-minded Biblicism on the basis of verbal
inspiration, which could not but lead to a severe conflict with
science and to the cultural impoverishment of the Protestant
world. The lack of a Christian conception of education was a
serious handicap.

This vacuum, however, became fatal directly Cartesian
rationalism and German idealism produced the new and inspir-
ing idea of Bildung 1 and when the 19th century, compelled by
the development of natural science and modern industry, forced
modern mankind to face entirely new problems. Whilst, in the
time of the great German idealists, history and classical anti-
quity were the primary material from which the education of
the gebildete Persdnlichkeit was expected, the demands now
became much more realistic and practical. Nature took the
place of history ; the social and political problems and struggles
of the present displaced the interest in antiquity. National
consciousness superseded idealistic cosmopolitanism ; the claims
of state and society left little room for the development of
personality. A new idea of education, originating from a

1 Culture.

54 EDUCATION [LECT.

naturalistic theory of evolution and from pragmatism, took the
place of the two older traditions — the Christian and the idealistic.
Education was now conceived as an adaptation to the social
environment.

The American philosopher, Dewey, was the first to formulate
this new realistic idea of education on the basis of a naturalistic
evolutionism. The extraordinary success which Dewey's
educational programme had, even amongst those who did not
agree with his naturalistic philosophy, is due in no small
measure to the fact that he drew, more or less unconsciously,
from humanistic and even Christian reserves. It is probable
that even the great example of Pestalozzi had^its share in his
educational conceptions.

This is now our educational situation : a chaotic mixture of
the most varied traditions and ideas : medieval and Protestant
Christianity, Rousseau, German idealism, pragmatic natural-
ism, Marxist economic materialism, nationalism and political
totalitarianism. The question is whether Christianity is capable
of producing a conception of education which can combine with
the highest claims of Christian personalism the Socratic element
of self-development on the one hand, the new insights of natural
science and the practical requirements of economic and political
life on the other.

If we answer this question with a confident " yes we do not
mean by this that this idea has already taken shape in our mind,
but only that our understanding of the Christian faith makes it
possible. We agree with the 18th century humanists that the
idea of personality must be in the centre of education. But it
is just in the understanding of personality that the roads part.
From the point of view of Christian faith, personality is not
something given, which only needs development, but it is a
relation. Personality is rooted in the relation to God. It is that
"self " of man which is called into existence by the divine
" Thou '\ Its centre is responsibility, understood as the response
of man to God's call. Its true realisation, and therefore true
humanity, is existence in divine love becoming concrete in love
towards our neighbour. This is Pestalozzi's idea of education.

IV] THE CHRISTIAN IDEA 55

We must, however, distinguish more clearly than he did between
the divine calling to this existence and an innate possibility.
This possibility does not He in man. It cannot be developed;
it must be given. But Pestalozzi is right, against his orthodox
critics, in maintaining that this personality does not come
to existence without man's highest activity; it is not thrown into
man, but man is called to it, so that nobody can take away his
own responsibility. Out of this conception of personality a new
educational programme can and must be developed, combining
the Socratic element of self-development with the Christian
concept of divine grace.

All the powers and possibilities of mind and body, which are
in man and which can and must be developed, are placed in a
new relationship and unity by this central act, by which true
personality is created. They are not denied but transformed.
Nobody becomes a genius by faith. Mathematical or physical
knowledge is not upset by the fact of conversion. There exists
a certain autonomy of the powers of reason, imagination and
feeling, given by the Creator, which have to be respected so
long as they are not absolutised. These powers then have to
be developed according to their own law, and this is the place of
the Socratic element. But it is no more than an acknowledgment
that all these powers are gifts of the Creator and subordinate to
the highest personal and communal destiny of man, as it is given
by the Christian faith, which can prevent them from anarchic
competition with each other and unify them harmoniously.
Furthermore, the development of innate powers has to take
account of the fact that man is a sinner and that nothing in him
is exempt from the destructive effects of sin. In this respect,
however, a fundamental law has to be considered. The more
peripheral or extraneous a sphere of life, i.e. the further it is
removed from the personal centre, the less does the question of
sin come in. It would be hard — though not impossible — to
discover the difference between a pagan or atheist and a Christian
mathematics, but we can certainly distinguish most clearly
between a Christian and a non-Christian conception of freedom,
of moral obligation, of marriage and family, because in all these

56 EDUCATION

questions the sinful " Ego " of man plays its role. The reformers
were undoubtedly right when they were inclined to learn from
Aristotle's logic but were rather sceptical concerning his
ethics; they were right in enjoying classical poetry and at the
same time criticising its pagan superstition or its moral con-
fusions. Furthermore, a Christian idea of education will be
distinguished by a positive appreciation of everyday life and
economic work. It will not, in idealistic snobbery, ignore the
fact that man has a stomach and must eat, and that he is created
with sexual desires. It will not forget, in these spheres parti-
cularly, that man is both God's creation and a sinner. It will
not therefore discard the wealth of new knowledge which
modern biology has given us, but it will refuse to accept pseudo-
scientific mythology without fearing the reproach of backward-
ness. It will not refuse to see man as a member of the animal
realm, but will at the same time emphasise that his humanity is
something perfectly new which cannot be derived from animal
life. It will, however, interpret this humanity of man not so
much in terms of his rational and creative capacities as in terms
of personality, and will therefore subordinate both his natural
and cultural requirements to his ultimate personal destiny. It
will put love and personal responsibility in the first place and
thus oppose the intellectualism and irresponsible individualism
and aestheticism of modern higher education, which is so largely
responsible for the cultural catastrophe of our age. In an age
of collectivist totalitarianism, Christian education is particularly
called upon to oppose the claims coming from that side and to
emphasise the supreme value of personality and personal
responsibility.

These are merely a few hints indicating that there is a
Christian idea of education although we may not yet clearly
know what it is. Those who feel the calling to work it out will
have to justify their claim to do so by making use of the most
important beginnings — the contributions of Pestalozzi and
Kierkegaard — and by seeing clearly the real crux of the pro-
blem : the relation between traditio — Christian and otherwise —
and Socratic self-development.

V

WORK

MEN do not work as a matter of course ; still less do they
want to work when they are not forced by necessity. Is
working something essentially human, or is it alien to
the human as such, and merely imposed upon men by outward
necessity? There are societies belonging to primitive civilisa-
tion — notably the Australian aborigines — in which men do not
work. They merely catch fish and gather berries when they are
hungry. There is, on the other hand, a state of highly
developed civilisation in which the bearers of cultural tradition
think it unworthy to work. The intensity of work in modern
western civilisation is a historical anomaly. Perhaps the
weakening of the will-to-work which we experience in some parts
of Europe is a reaction against this anomalous tempo of work.
At any rate it is a symptom of the unsolved problem of the
meaning of work.

If you ask, " Why does man work? " the answer is generally :
"Because unless he works he goes hungry. If this necessity
ceases, he stops working and plays." This answer is obviously
only part of the truth. There are people who want to work, who
do not feel at their ease without working, or for whom work is
an obligation of self-respect. They would feel themselves to be
idlers, parasites of human society if they did not take part in
work, which is the basis of existence for civilised humanity.
There are people to whom work is a religious obligation, a divine
calling. The problem of the meaning of work leads us right
into the ultimate question of the meaning of life itself.

Few people philosophise about their jobs. One does work,
and anyone who doesn't want to will soon see that he has
to. For most people the question does not arise, because
there is no alternative; that is why history often leaves us

57

58 WORK [LECT.

without a definite answer. Most men work because they must;
whether this is their only motive or whether, apart from
necessity, there are other stimuli, remains an open question. But
the question takes on specific urgency when under certain social
conditions the necessity to work has been somehow loosened or
even removed. It is because of this close connection with
outward necessity that work is suspected of being a mere servi-
tude of human existence, a burden which must be thrown off by
those who have a higher idea of life.

This was the view of classical antiquity. To work for the
necessities of life is something degrading for men. Work is
good for what the Greek called banausoi — the Helots and slaves
—not for the free Hellenes. The Greek free man should be
exempt from this necessity : he, the bearer of spirit, shall lead a
spiritual existence. Certainly, he should not be inactive;
activity belongs to the essence of the mind and therefore to a
truly human existence. But this activity should not be work,
it should not have anything to do with preservation of physical
life. The free man ought to create, but he ought not to work.
This accords with the Greek philosophical anthropology,
namely, that the distinctive element of the human is the spirit,
while the body is the partie honteuse of man's existence. There-
fore free spiritual activity, grounded in itself and not tied to any
biological necessity, is the only worthy existence for man.
Useful work aimed at preserving life is a mere continuation of
animal existence; biological necessity is the lowest category of
human purpose, making the mind an instrument of animal
instincts.

This depreciation of useful work has never been expressed
more clearly or rationally than by Aristotle. But in this, as in
so many other respects, Aristotle is a true spokesman of typical
Hellenic views. Along with the Aristotelian theory of values,
this conception of work was introduced into the Christian
Middle Ages and blended with the feudal class structure of
society. Only it was no longer spiritual activity in the cultural,
but in the religious sense, which forms the apex of this structure.
The lowest class is that of the peasant, his activity being the

V] CLASSICAL AND MARXIST CONCEPTIONS 59

continuation of animal life; the highest is that of the homo
religiosus; between the two extremes there is a scale determined
by the Aristotelian classical opposition of spirit and matter.

This order of values broadly determines the views of the
cultured European. He distinguishes between " low " work and
"higher" (cultural) activities of man. Economic activity,
manual work, is " low whilst free, creative, cultural activity is
" high And it is so much the higher as it is independent of
the shameful link with the necessities of life. The highest
spiritual activity therefore is that of the free artist or scholar
who has not — or should not have — to worry about his living.

This Aristotelian scale of values, which for centuries has
dominated European civilisation, has not remained .unchal-
lenged. It was in the middle of last century that a radical
reaction took place in Karl Marx's economic theory of history.
The devaluation of useful economic work gave way to its
opposite, which we might call " the myth of the working man
Economic work to produce the necessaries of life now becomes
the real substance of human history and of man's life; according
to Marx this is the theme of all history. And the dramatic
factor is merely the distribution of the fruit of this work. Let
us not forget that the Greek devaluation of economic work was
possible only on the basis of slavery. Whilst the Athenian
gentlemen were philosophising in the market place, their slaves
had to do the drudgery under inhuman conditions, as beasts of
burden, so that the Athenian gentlemen, having gained an
appetite from their philosophical disputes, might have some-
thing worth while to eat on coming home. Similarly the
aristocratic-clerical class-system of the Middle Ages was possible
only on the basis of agricultural serfdom, the thrall having to
do the mean, low work for the higher and the highest ranks,
the nobility and the clerical aristocracy. It is in view of these
facts that the Marxian picture and its protest against hypo-
critical ideology and fictions gain their power of conviction. All
this cultural existence, it was said, was based upon exploitation.
At the cost of the drudgery of the peasant, the higher classes
could lead their parasitic, spiritual luxury-existence. Idealism,

60 WORK [LECT.

according to Marx, solves the problem of the meaning of work
by dividing it into two parts — spiritual activity and economic
work; acknowledging only the first as human, but at the same
time living upon those who by necessity do the second. This
idealistic conception, then, is characterised by an insincere
dualism. It asserts the possibility of a spiritual life without
economic interests, whereas the spiritual life can only be lived
because the economic necessities are provided by others who are
stupid or powerless enough to do it.

I do not hesitate to give a large measure of credit to this
Marxian " debunking " of a false, dualistic conception of work.
By this Marxian reaction the worker — now the labourer —
becomes the "real man". The one who, according to the
Aristotelian and the medieval theories was the lowest, the pro-
ducer of economic values, now becomes the true bearer of human
history and civilisation. The working man is the hero of the
social revolution and its eschatology. He is the centre of the
new myth and the content of the new religion.

This radical turn, however, would not have been possible
without a thorough preparation in the bourgeois mentality and
society. In a way, Marxism is only a last phase of bourgeois
capitalism. It was then that the transvaluation of values from
the spiritual to the material economic scale of values took place.
That economic values are the highest, the genuine reality, is not
an invention of Karl Marx, but of capitalist society of the 19th
century. This pan-economism was practically the philosophy
of the time, long before Karl Marx gave it the theoretical form
of " historical materialism ". " Money rules the world." The
dispute between Marx and the capitalists is merely concerned
with the question who shall have money. The view they hold
in common is that economic goods are the substance of life.
Therefore they agree that the question why we should work
cannot arise. Life consists of these two things : making money
by producing material goods and consuming them.

This revolutionary transvaluation of the Aristotelian scale of
values, by which the lowest becomes the highest, means the
self-sufficiency of the economic motive of work: one works, of

v] "vocation" 6i

course, in order to live, and life means enjoying the goods pro-
duced. While the classical solution is based on a fictitious
idealism — fictitious because it presupposes the very unidealistic
separation of society into a cultural elite and a majority of
uncultural, unfree economic producers — 19th century economics,
both capitalist and Marxist, represents a practical materialism in
which man's life and economy are ultimately identical. The
first solution corresponds to an anthropology in which man is
essentially spirit, imprisoned in a body. The second, materialist,
solution corresponds to an anthropology in which man is essen-
tially a body, and mind or spirit merely a concomitant
by-product of the body, producing in its turn the so-called
ideologies. Both solutions are equally unsatisfactory and
unrealistic.

Christian anthropology avoids the idealistic as well as the
materialistic onesidedness. It takes man to be a unity of body
and mind, because the body is created by God as well as the
spirit. The classical hierarchy of values, calling the bodily life
" low is impossible here. Therefore bodily work is in no way
degrading, unworthy of men. Instead of the opposition between
the " low " and the " high we find here the relation of ends
and means, of " within " and " without The body is the
organ and the means of expression of man's divine destiny.
Man must not be ashamed of his body and its needs, both being
created by God and therefore good. Work done by the body
and for the body is not inferior, but a consequence of God's
will. The Bible does not show any trace of an ascetic devalu-
ation of bodily and economic life. The medieval predilection
for virginity and for a religious life detached from the world
has its roots not so much in Christianity as in Hellenistic
antiquity.

Luther's rediscovery of the Biblical meaning of " vocation "
or "calling" had revolutionary consequences. In the Middle
Ages it was only the monk and the priest who had a divine
vocation, not the layman. The idea of the homo religiosus
being, by his divine vocation, the apex of the social scale domi-
nated the whole of the structure of feudal society, culminating

62 WORK [LECT.

in the Pope and — at the other extreme — the peasant in an almost
slave-like abasement. He, of course, had no divine vocation;
this was the exclusive privilege of the homines religiosi. It was
a direct consequence of Luther's rediscovery of the New Test-
ment message that every Christian, whether a priest, a monk, a
king or a housemaid, being called into the service of God, may
look at the work he or she is doing as a divine calling or vocation.
There is nothing " low " about the work of a housemaid. It is
just as " high 99 as reading the mass or the breviary. It does not
matter what you do, provided that whatever you do is done as a
divine service to the glory of God.

By this new idea of calling or vocation the fatal dilemma is
removed: the choice is between the highest valuation of the
spiritual with a consequent devaluation of the economic physical
work, or the removal of this dualism on the basis of a merely
materialistic economy. If all work is divine service, it is
ennobled by this highest calling. The differente in value no
longer lies in the kind of work which is done, but simply in its
having, or not having, this divine purpose. The housemaid,
the peasant, the cobbler, the industrial worker have equal title
to divine nobility as the judge, the abbot, the artist or the king,
if they do their work as a divine " calling " or vocation. The
valuation of work is shifted from the " what " to the " why "
and "how".

This new conception of vocation therefore ennobles the
common man and his working day. Wherever a labourer does
his work as God's servant, he has a better claim to a spiritual
existence than an artist or scientist who knows nothing of
divine calling. The traditional conception of spiritual work
proves to be false. Spiritual work is done wherever work has
this highest perspective. Our traditional conception of spiritual
work originates from that abstract idealism which separates
spirit and body. This spiritual snobbery is the counterpart of
materialist vulgarism. Both are overcome by a truly Christian
understanding of vocation. This high valuation of economic
work as being a service of God cannot fall a prey to materialistic
vulgarisation any more; the valuation of intellectual or aesthetic

V] THE DILEMMA SOLVED 63

work as being a service of God, no more and no less than the
work of the farm-labourer seen in the same perspective, leaves
no room for spiritual snobbery. The farmer, Johannes, in
Gotthelf s Uli, der Knecht, who sits at night with his servant,
Uli, to watch a calving cow, and uses this time to talk to him
about his problems as a Christian brother, is enjoying a spiritual
existence just as much as Johann Sebastian Bach composing a
cantata in honour of God.

Work conceived as the service of God is at the same time
serving men. On this basis the division of labour cannot lead
to the formation of classes or castes. Employer and employee,
government and people, are brothers. If people take their
Christian faith seriously, everyone knows that his specific
function in society is service for the common good. Higher
power, as involved in higher office, means so much greater
responsibility for service. The Christian conception of vocation
does not remove functional hierarchy. There is an Above and
a Below, there is graded competence. But all this is functional,
dienstlich, as we say in German — a term which refers to service,
and has nothing whatever to do with distinction of value, nor
any connotation of unfreedom. The soldier has to obey the
officer, but the officer is not " more " than the soldier. In spite
of functional subordination, they are equal.

Karl Marx saw clearly that the division of labour, as it has
developed in history, is closely related to the development of
different kinds of feudalism, of caste and class systems in which
the so-called " higher " exploits the so-called " lower He saw,
further, that all sorts of metaphysical and religious ideas have
been used to justify these systems of exploitation. It is hardly
his fault that he did not see the true social consequences of the
Christian idea of vocation, because empirical Christianity did
not manifest much of it. It is within the so-called Christian
world that the feudal structure of the Middle Ages and the class
structure of modern society originated. Just as in classical
antiquity society shows a cleavage between an unfree majority
doing the economic drudgery and a free non-working ilite form-
ing the basis of a cultural life, so in the age of capitalism there was

64 WORK [LEGT.

a cleavage between those living on independent capital income
and those living on dependent wages. Because capital income is
independent, while wage-income is dependent, the capitalist can
decide how the proceeds of the work are to be divided, which, of
course, he does entirely for his own profit. To oversimplify
grossly : he takes the gold for himself, gives silver to the manage-
ment, and the copper to the worker. In this fashion a modern
caste system is formed within a society with equal political
rights. There is a small ilite having the means of a rich cultural
existence, while the larger masses are doomed to cultural
helotism. The non-working elite lives at the cost of the hard-
working mass, on the backs of which it produces and consumes
the higher cultural goods.

Onesided as this analysis may be, there is so much obvious
truth in it that the masses of the working people, having once
become aware of these facts — at the same time being misled by
the onesidedness and exaggerations of this theory of exploita-
tion — cannot have a right attitude to their work. This is one
of the main causes of the present crisis of labour. The second
cause seems to be of a merely technical nature, but is closely
related to the first: the progressive division of labour, with its
ultimate development, the assembly-line method of production.

Once the owner of capital is separated from the actual work,
his only motive is profit. In order to increase profit, he has to
accelerate the process of work to get as much out of his invested
capital as possible. The human factor, the relation of the
workers to their work, is of secondary, if any, importance. More
and more the machine thinks for the worker, while the share of
the individual worker in the meaningful whole of the work
decreases. The relation of the worker to his work becomes more
and more impersonal and the meaning of his work becomes
invisible. He seems to be merely an unimportant part of the
machinery, whilst the meaning of what he does passes from his
horizon. Much of the satisfaction felt by the farmer, in his
intimate relation to natural growth, and the artisan in creating
a useful object, is denied the worker at the assembly-line.

The third cause of the crisis may be more important than the

v ] THE MODERN CRISIS 65

two others: unemployment and insecurity. The deep-rooted
fear of unemployment shows more clearly than anything else
that man does not work merely in order to get his living. Un-
employment is dreaded even where its economic effects are
minimised by insurance. Why then is unemployment so greatly
feared? First, because it throws a man out not merely of a
job, but of meaningful work which gives his life the dignity of
creativity and service. Second, because it gives the unemployed
the feeling of being a parasite of society. He feels himself,
although innocently, under sentence of the judgment, " If any
will not work neither let him eat He feels he is living at the
cost of other people. He is ashamed to eat what others produce.
It is this fear of unemployment, inherent in our present economic
system, which more than anything else makes him hate this
system and his working share in it. It is this permanent
insecurity of the wage-earner which makes him conscious of his
dependence an<^ his social rootlessness.

It cannot be denied that these are features of our prevalent
western economic system. It is another question whether a
collectivist state-socialist system would make much difference to
the worker's attitude to his work. A nationalised economy
will not stop the progressive division of labour, nor abolish the
assembly-line. The nationalisation of capital will not remove
the dependence of the individual worker. Whether a state-
controlled economy will be able to avert unemployment is at
least an open question. On the other hand, it cannot be doubted
— because it is already proved — that collectivism creates new
factors which are unfavourable to a positive valuation of work.
In a complete state-economy, the worker would hardly be
allowed to strike or to choose his own working place, while he
would always have to fear the punishment of an omnipotent
employer.

It is one of the main effects of a truly Christian view of life
that one does not accept the alternative of capitalism or collecti-
vist state-economy. This " either-or " is a false abstraction,
disproved by history. Pure capitalism, as seen by Marx, does
not exist any longer, because of the powerful reaction of trade

66 WORK. [LECT.

unionism and state legislation. We are, however, far from
having exhausted all the economic reserves of a conception of
work which is neither individualistic nor collectivist, based
neither on a false idealism nor on a false materialism, but upon a
Christian understanding of man and work.

The attitude to work is ultimately a religious question.
Experience shows that even within the present economic system
it is not impossible — though it is difficult — to do one's work as
service for God and men. If we keep in mind what St. Paul
could expect from the slave members of the Christian com-
munity, we may come to the conclusion that the primary factor
in the crisis of work is the disappearance of the Christian faith.
While it is true that all kinds of slavery are a disgrace to a
Christian society and have to be fought, it is also true, and even
more true, that a real believer can do his work as a service for
God and men whatever the system may be. Capitalism in the
Marxian sense is just as little reconcilable with o Christianity as
is totalitarianism. Both have to be fought equally as destructive
of the dignity of work. But while it is a serious obligation of
the Christian Church to overcome this fatal " eitheror it is the
blessing of vital Christian faith to preserve the conception of
divine calling even in the most unworthy conditions.

By the Christian idea of vocation all work is personalised as
well as communalised. It is seen as part of one social body, as
a contribution within a working community. Everyone does
his service in his place and within its limits, and therefore gets
his appropriate remuneration. The more this communal spirit
is alive, the less need is there of the stimulus of privileges for
specific services. From this ideal picture of a Christian com-
munity, we can deduce the nature of those factors which
threaten and destroy the community of work.

First among these is the oligarchic misuse of the functional
hierarchy, i.e* the exploitation of the functional subordinates in
the interests of a selfish plutocracy or a tyrannical bureaucracy.
Whether it is the capitalist " boss " or the communist commissar
that is exploiting his functional position for selfish ends makes
little difference. By this selfish exploitation of a position of

V] DIVISION OF LABOUR 07

power they make it difficult, i£ not impossible, for the worker to
look at his work as a service. The second danger is ochlocratic,
i.e. the fanaticism of equality which has no use for any kind of
subordination. Nothing is more ruinous to the community of
work than this egalitarianism. It destroys co-operation even
more radically than does oligarchic misuse. The mere idea of
radical equality poisons the atmosphere of work. Where the
feeling is prevalent that any kind of inequality is as such an
injustice, there can never be a positive valuation of work until
every thing is equalised. This perhaps is the most serious
element in the crisis of labour at the present time.

Someone may object that of course division of labour and
functional differentiation of competence must exist, but that no
kind of privilege should be derived from it. Every servant of
the community ought to be treated with absolute equality. Our
reply is, first, that wherever this view of equality prevails, even
functional differentiation will always be looked at with resent-
ment and jealousy. Radical egalitarianism cannot stand any
subordination. Secondly, as human nature is, it is impossible
to get functional differentiation without the stimulus of
privilege. Only in a society of perfect saints would it be possible
to get a maximum of service and the necessary minimum of
functional differentiation, with its different degrees of responsi-
bility, without some kind of social privilege as a stimulus.
Society has to pay for higher service the price of social privileges.

To ignore this fundamental social law means to ruin any kind
of social order. Even Bolshevist society had to learn that. But
this fundamental law is discredited wherever the principle of
egalitarianism dominates people's minds. It is beautiful if
individual Christians, of their own accord, renounce all privilege
— examples are not too frequent! — but it is entirely false to
make this a general principle of Christian ethics and to discredit
privilege in any sense as unethical. Wherever this radical
egalitarianism takes hold of people's minds, its levelling results
do not stop short of the dissolution of the social order. Equality
is a principle .of the highest importance within Christian ethics,
but radical egalitarianism is the most dangerous poison within

F

68 WORK [LECT*

any working community. No society and no positive valuation
of work is possible where this egalitarianism prevails. In saying
this we do not favour unjust inequality, but we wish to discredit
the identification of justice with equality.

Apart from egoistic motives, it is only the belief in God's
creation which affords a real motive for work. By it man knows
two things : that being a spiritual-bodily unity, he is destined to
work; and that by being created as a person in community, he is
created for community in work. Wherever this faith prevails,
the motive of work is guaranteed even in the most unsatisfactory
conditions.

Where there is at present a weakening of the will-to-work it is
an outgrowth of our artificial civilisation and, at bottom, a conse-
quence of secularism. As we have seen in our lecture on technics,
Western society has not proved capable of mastering the tech-
nical development in such a way that technical progress could be
made serviceable to the human person and to^the life of the
community. Futhermore, technical " progress " in combination
with other factors has led to economic conditions — of which we
shall speak in a later lecture — which make it difficult to keep
the Christian conception of work. A worker who feels himself
exploited by the capitalist can hardly be expected to think of his
work in terms of divine " calling *\ But let us not forget that
these economic conditions, as well as that false autonomous
development, are themselves the consequences of a deep spiritual
disorientation. Neither the crazy technical development, with
its complete disregard for man and its mania of production for
the sake of production and profit, nor the " capitalist system
with its disregard for human personality and community, could
have originated in a truly Christian civilisation. In addition,
thi weakening of the will-to-work is due in no small degree to a
false, abstract doctrine of equality derived not from a Christian
but from a rationalist idea of man and to a Socialist or Com-
munist utopianism which makes believe that in a completely
socialised economy all problems would be solved.

It is also true that modern technics, with its extreme speciali-
sation, has made it hard even for good Christians to look on

V] THE PROBLEM OF THE MOTIVE 69

factory work as a divine vocation. We should not, however,
overemphasise this element of the present situation. Difficulties
arising from technical specialisation are not comparable in
gravity with the others. They can be overcome by creative
efforts on the part of labour and management. Such efforts are
already being made and extensive study is going on with pro-
mising results. The Christian community has a specific task in
just this field, namely, to work out a concrete doctrine of
vocation through its lay members who know the jobs and their
threat to working morale, and to demand and to create such
technical and psychological conditions as are necessary to regain
the lost sense of work as a divine calling.

On the other hand, it is necessary to reshape the social
structure of the worker's world in such a way as to take away his
feeling of being a mere cog in an impersonal machinery,
exploited by impersonal forces. It will be part of this pro-
gramme to 4jspel the great illusion of our day that the
nationalisation or socialisation of industry would do away with
impersonalism and exploitation. But, while all this is true, we
should not lose sight of the fact that the main problem is
neither technical nor social, but spiritual. So long as the process
of secularisation goes on as it has been doing now for two or
three centuries, I see no hope whatever of regaining a right
atmosphere of work. Whether or not we achieve a reasonable
compromise between Capitalism and Socialism, the problem of
the motive of work will continue to exist even if suppressed by
compulsion. A true solution can only come through a return
to that conception of work which the gospel alone can give —
the conception that work, whatever it may be, is the service of
God and of the community and therefore the expression of man's
dignity.

Empirical Christianity has failed to work out this conception
of work in an age of technics. It may not be too late to do that
still, but it will need no less than a great revival of Christianity
in order to make this theory effective on a national and world-
wide scale.

To close with, let us have a look at the other possibility : the

70 WORK [LEGT.

hypertrophy of the will-to-work, i.e. work-fanaticism. This
modern phenomenon is to be interpreted as a spiritual Mangel
krankheit} There is a vacuum in the soul, an inner unrest from
which one escapes by work. Work-fanaticism is proportional to
the poverty of die soul. As nervous people cannot keep still, man
with his unrestful soul cannot but work. The modern Western
world is somehow possessed with this work-fanaticism as a result
of inward impoverishment. Of course there is also another cause
of this phenomenon which, however, is closely related to the
first, namely, the incessant increase of material claims. But do
not let us forget that many who are not inwardly seized by this
fanaticism of work suffer all the same from its consequences.
Those who do not want to get under the wheels have to adapt
themselves to the modern tempo of work. It is fair to say that
Western man, from sheer absorption in work, no longer knows
what it means to live. You may find even on a tombstone the
words : " His life was work It is here that t^te fourth com-
mandment comes in: the Sabbath belongs to the order of
creation. Man is created by God in such a way that he needs
the Sabbath. Where the Sabbath-rest disappears, the human
character of life also disappears.

It is a strange paradox of the present day scene that we are
suffering from a work-fanaticism and work-idolatry as well as
from a lack of will-to-work. This paradox cannot be understood
merely by surface-psychology and sociology. Both these pheno-
mena come from the same root, the loss of the sense of the
eternal meaning of life. When a man loses this divine perspec-
tive, he throws himself into work and becomes a work-fanatic;
or he sees no meaning in work and runs away from it, if he is
not compelled by necessity or by the state. Just as the true
motive of work comes from having a place in God's plan, so the
desire of the soul for quiet and true recreation comes from the
awareness of a higher destiny. God requires of us both that we
do work even if outward necessity does not force us, and that we
do rest and give our soul a chance of breathing. It may be that
in a near future the problem of leisure will prove just as pressing
1 Deficiency-disease.

V] WORK AND LIFE 71

as that of work ; indeed it is already becoming one of the major
problems of our civilisation. Just as man's work can be emptied
of meaning, so can his leisure. The mere escape from work
into leisure, and into work from an empty life, is no solution.
The real solution is such a conception of life as gives room and
meaning to both instead of exchanging one emptiness for
another. It has been proved within the Christian community
that a life grounded in God's will finds the right rhythm of work
and leisure, as expressed in the fourth commandment.

VI

ART

HUMAN activity is not merely working, producing
useful things which are necessary for the preservation
of life. The human spirit transcends this sphere of vital
necessity. Man decorates his home, he adorns his garment and
his garden, he builds not only a solid, but a beautiful house, he
carves, he draws, he paints without any useful purpose, merely
from the inner drive for beauty and self-expression. He makes
poetry, he sings, he invents stories, he acts plays. If we ask for
a word embracing all that, it seems to be again, as in the case of
science, the German language alone which dares to form this
all-comprehensive concept of Kunst, whilst the English and
French, following the Latin tradition, speak of the liberal arts in
the plural, including in them also what the German calls
Geisteswissenschaften. This daring, comprehending concep-
tion, which combines the arts of the eye with those of the ear,
has the great merit of leading our attention to something
common in them all, the element of creativity, which is
detached from all usefulness and intent merely upon creating
beautiful work for the enjoyment of its beauty.

Many attempts have been made to solve the riddle why
men do all this. It cannot be our task to add one more to a
hundred existing theories of art, but merely to see how, from
the Christian faith, this most mysterious and at the same time
most enjoyable phenomenon of culture is to be understood and
what its relation is to the Christian faith.

At first sight, art seems to be wholly independent of religion.
Kunst comes from konnen; a Kunstler is a man who can do
something that others cannot. Similarly we use the word
artist, sometimes in a very general sense. We speak of the art
of riding, of skating, of tailoring, and so on. But we are con-

72

AN OBJECTIVE INTENTION 73

scious that by art in the proper sense we mean something higher.
Mere virtuosity is not yet art, although the transition may be
gradual. We speak of art in the proper sense where works of
permanent value are created. Often art has been defined as the
production of the beautiful, and therefore the secret of art has
been identified with the secret of beauty. But the idea of
beauty seems inadequate to indicate the mystery of art. What
has Hamlet or King Lear, what has Goya's " Bull Fight what
has Strauss' " Eulenspiegel " to do with beauty? Beauty is a
fascinating mystery, but art is more mysterious than beauty.

Why do men create works of art? We put aside all accidental
motives, such as gaining one's living, love of fame and power.
The work of art is so much the greater as these motives are less
prominent. Art is surrender to something supra-personal. It
originates from an inner urge. It is pledged to a spiritual
" ought " which is almost as severe as the moral one; we speak
of artistic conscience. We honour Rembrandt who, in his early
days a spoilt and prosperous favourite of society, in his later
years lost the favour of the public because he painted according
to his artistic conscience without any compromise with the taste
of the public, so that he died in poverty.

We know that the Aristotelian theory, which gives first place
to the imitation of nature, is inadequate, even for the explana-
tion of painting, whilst in all other arts the model of nature
hardly plays any role. In any case, whether it be in poetry,
painting or music, the work of art is the expression of something
inward, passing on that inwardness to the one who enjoys it.
Art therefore, in all its branches, is expression capable of im-
pressing. But in distinction from speech, it is without direct refer-
ence to the " receiver It has an objective intention, making it,
to a certain degree, independent and indifferent as to whether
there is somebody who might enjoy it or not. In medieval glass
paintings there are parts which can normally hardly be seen by
anybody but which are just as carefully designed and painted as
the visible parts. The artistic expression is so united with the
inward feeling, that both cannot be detached from each other.
The artistic form is externalised inwardness. The true artist

74 ART [LECT.

does not like to speak of an " idea " of his work, he is— emphati-
cally—not a double of the philosopher. Form and inwardness
are one. The artist creating his work creates a second reality
distinguished from nature by its anthropomorphism. It is
materialised soul and exalted nature. The work of art is the
product of imagination. The German word for imagination,
Einbildung, is an aesthetics in a nutshell The power of
imagination is the capacity to externalise inwardness or to
spiritualise matter. Once more we ask: Why do men do this?
And why do others enjoy the results? A negative reason is
obvious: They want to transcend existing reality because for
some reason it does not satisfy. Artistic creation is somehow a
correction and completion of reality. The dramas of Shake-
speare show us people like ourselves. Why then this duplication
of the human tragedy and comedy? The persons of Shake-
speare's tragedies are no duplicates of those of every-day experi-
ence, they are the products of a sifting enhancement which cuts
away what is casual and enlarges the essential. Art is conden-
sation, omitting the unimportant and magnifying the important;
art intensifies and elates, it brings order to the chaotic, gives
form to the casual and shape to the shapeless, it exalts and
ennobles the material reality to which it gives form.

What, for instance, is the meaning of the verse in poetry? *
If man wants to say something important, he tries to make as
great a distance as^yossible between that and mere talk. He
wants to liberate his speech from every-day casualness, he gives it
gebundene Form. The free submission under a law, the mount-
ing of springing life in a self-chosen discipline, the firm shape
of that which otherwise is shapeless, gives his speech lasting
form, nobility.

Art, then, is the attempt of man to raise himself out of the
casualness, lowness, transitoriness of every-day life to a higher
existence. This is the elevating effect of all art whatever its
content may he. There is nothing elevating in the content of
Othello, but in its form, which gives to human passion a purity,
a necessity and an intensity by which it represents a higher
form of existence. All art strives with more or less success after

Vl] THE ELEVATION OF EXISTENCE 75

perfection which cannot be found in reality. Art is an
imaginary elevation of life in the direction of the perfect

Imaginary indeed! Of course a Greek temple or a Gothic
cathedral are not imaginary, but very real, built of massive
blocks. But the beauty of this work is an imaginary elevation
of life, a perfection which does not belong to ordinary existence
but stands apart. Art does not change our life. The aesthetic
solution of a problem by which a poet gets rid of it is no real
solution, no real liberation. Art originates from and lives
within imagination; it is an imaginary reality, similar to the
dream. As long as we dream happily, happiness is real, but
when we awake this happiness is gone. It cannot be integrated
into our reality; it stands outside of that continuity which we
call reality. Reality is the same to-day and to-morrow, but the
dream of to-night will not be the dream of to-morrow. When
the sound of Bach's Double Violin Concerto, which filled me
with heavenly joy, has faded away, it still somehow remains
with me for a while, like a beautiful dream when I awake. But
then comes reality which is not heavenly joy, but sorrow and
conflict, which the beauty of Bach's Concerto cannot alter.

This is the limit of art. It is imaginary, playing perfection.
It is the greatness and the delight of art to be perfection; it is
its limitation to be merely imaginary perfection. It is the
danger of art that it is so powerful although imaginary. Is
there really a danger in art? Is art not that one thing in our
life for which we can be thankful and which we can enjoy
without reserve? This indeed is our first response : as Christians
we say : art is one of the great gifts of God the Creator. Works
of art are not produced as a matter of course. Talent or genius
is the decisive element, and this is a gift of the Creator. It is
not in vain that the word " talent " is taken from the Biblical
parable which speaks of trusteeship. What then is its danger?
It lies close to its very essence. Its essence is to be imaginary,
its danger is that imaginary perfection may be confounded with
real perfection. Art then becomes a substitute for religion.
One looks for something in art, which it is not able to give ; real
elevation, real perfection. This confusion is what we call

76 ART [LECT.

aestheticism. Art is not to be blamed for it, and it can be said
that the great artists have rarely become victims of this tempta-
tion. This confusion of imagination with reality happens more
often to those who enjoy art than to the productive genius.

Furthermore, it must be said that art does not really displace
religion, but rather fills a vacuum in the soul which ought to be
Med by faith. But we cannot evade the question whether there
is not a fundamental opposition between art and faith, as
expressed in the second commandment of the Decalogue.
" Thou shalt not make unto Thee a graven image, nor the like-
ness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth
beneath, or that is in the water under the earth." Can the
believer in face of this unambiguous prohibition enjoy art
without reserve? One might reply that the divine prohibition
is not referred to art as such but to idolatry, that is, to panthe-
istic confusion of Creator and creation. The question, however,
remains whether art as the work of imagination and as imag-
inary perfection does not involve a fundamental conflict with
faith in the invisible perfect One from whom alone comes real
perfection. Is there not a secret opposition between the enjoy-
ment of heavenly beauty in the imaginary world of art and the
hope in the real heavenly redemption? Is not art, at its best,
some kind of parallel to pantheistic mysticism, both being an
anticipation of heavenly bliss here and now?

It seems to me, we must not be extreme on either side. The
true artist is no ecstatic who forgets about reality. Great art
has always been rather tragic than happy, just as we can say
that tragedy is the highest form of art. In tragedy and in all
tragic art, man is conscious of his predicament and of his need
for redemption. It is only the artist of the second rank who
want§ to deceive men and himself with the belief that art itself
can solve the contradictions of human reality. One great poet,
defining the origin and essence of his art, says: und wo der
Mensch in seiner Qual verstummt, gab mir ein Gott zu sagen,
was ich hide. We need not therefore take too seriously that
mystical or pantheistic danger, great as it may be, but we must
take account of the opposite possibility that art can, by its

Vl] THE PROBLEM OF " CHRISTIAN ART " 77

capacity to intensify and to emphasise the essential, show to man
with particular impressiveness his real situation as a creature
needing redemption.

We have to face the problem of Christian art. First of all,
Christian art is not merely a possibility, but a historical reality.
Since the decay of the Roman Empire during more than a
thousand years, European art has been " Christian At first,
this does not mean more than that the majority of the works of
architecture in this era were Christian churches, from the Byzan-
tine basilicas of Ravenna and Monreale to St. Peter's in Rome
and the baroque churches of Germany and Austria. It means,
furthermore, that the sculpture of these centuries is primarily
Church decoration, that the subject-matter of painting, too, is
drawn mostly from Biblical stories of Christian legends, that
poetry and music, up to the time of Bach, are dedicated to the
service of Church life. It is, then, an indubitable fact — although
a fact which noeds interpretation — that during more than ten
centuries art in all its aspects was an expression primarily
Christian in essence and served the Christian Church. The
question remains, however, in what sense we can speak of
Christian art.

We should beware from the outset of two extreme views : the
one is a naive confusion of Christian art with art, the contents
of which or the themes of which are Christian. When certain
painters of the 16th century Renaissance treat Biblical themes
or Christian legend, it is obvious that this connection between
Art and Christianity is merely an outward and casual one.
Sometimes, as in the case of the great Peter Breughel, one might
even call this relation ironical. Even if we allow for the fact
that the religious expression of an Italian is, in any case, more
declamatory and dramatic than that of a North European, and
even if we grant that Roman Catholic Christianity in itself is
more externalised than Protestant, still we must confess that
there is a kind of Renaissance art which, in spite of its Christian
content, cannot really be called Christian. On the other hand,
we cannot acknowledge the formalist theory that it is of no
importance for art to have a Christian content or indeed any

78 ART [LEGT.

content at all. Here, then, we are up against the difficult
problem of form and content in art.

First, it cannot be denied that in art form and not content is
primary. It is great art, when van Gogh paints a sunflower,
when Daumier paints a boulevard scene. It is not great art
when Kaulbach, in an enormous picture, interprets the Refor-
mation. One might say, then, that content is nothing and form
everything. Futhermore, what should " content " mean in pure
music? But, on the other hand, could you seriously contend
that it does not matter whether Michelangelo chooses as his
object the Biblical story of Creation and the Fall or treats
some scene of e very-day life? Do you think that Bach could
express his deepest feelings, as in his B Minor Mass, just
as well by using some banal worldly text? Or that it was by
chance that Rembrandt in his later years turned more and more
exclusively to Biblical stories? What, after all, is form and
content when an inward world has to be visibly or audibly incar-
nated? The relation between art and religion, between art and
Christian faith, cannot be accidental, even though there exists
supreme art without any noticeable relation to religion. There
must be some deep connection between art and religion and,
in particular, between art and Christian faith. What is it?

Let us start with Greek tragedy. It may not be of decisive
importance that the Greek theatre grew out of a religious cere-
mony, just as the great manifestation of Greek architecture and
sculpture originated from religious life. But tragedy as such —
the phenomenon of the tragic — cannot be understood without
man's relation to the moral order of the world. Without tragic
guilt, no tragedy. It is not by chance that a Christian tragedy
does not exist. Not because there was not enough dramatic
talent to form a tragedy, but because Christian faith and the
tragic understanding of life are irreconcilable. This form of
art then, tragedy, has a definitely religious but certainly no
Christian basis. How could you separate here form and con-
tent? Take a parallel from within Christian times : the Biblical
oratorio and the musical Mass, where the text supplies incom-
parable musical possibilities. Certainly, there do exist oratoria

Vl] CATHOLIC AND PROTESTANT 79

of an entirely secular character; the musical form of an oratorio
is not necessarily tied to the Christian content. But it cannot
be a matter of chance that so many of the greatest works of
music are those in which Christian texts are interpreted by-
music.

Even if we understand musical art merely from the point of
view of dynamic expression, we would still have to take account
of the fact that there are emotions of the soul, tensions and con-
trasts, and therefore a dynamism which cannot be found apart
from religious, nay, even Christian faith. If you think of the
" Sanctus " or the " Kyrie eleison " of Bach's Mass, you can
hardly deny that such music could not be created but by a
deeply Christian composer. Take another example: It is
hardly to be denied that the Roman Catholic faith has a closer
relation to the arts of the eye than the Protestant, that, on the
other hand, Protestant church music has reached heights which
no Catholic composition has attained to. Roman Catholic
faith tends to the visual, its relation to the visible is essentially
positive, whilst Evangelical faith clings to the Word and has
only an indirect and uncertain relation to the visible. That is
why painting disappears in the Protestant Church, whilst
church music acquires an importance which it never had before.

The relation between art and religion, art and Biblical faith,
must not be studied merely to answer the question as to what im-
portance the religious element has for art; but also from the
other viewpoint, to answer the question whether religion and
Christian faith do not in themselves tend towards artistic
expression. The Christian community through the ages has been
a singing community. Christian worship is hardly thinkable
without a hymn, psalm, chorale or anthem. The praise of God,
joyful thanks, and passionate supplication of the congregation
almost necessarily take shape in singing. There is hardly a more
alarming, though infallible criterion of the decline of Christian
community life than the decadence of Christian church music
in the last two centuries. The Christian hymns that have been
invented and sung during the last century have little to do with
art, whilst the choral melodies which abounded in the first two

t$0 ART [LECT.

centuries of the Reformation churches were works of art of the
first order; even Bach, who did not himself produce one, showed
almost envious admiration of them.

Not every live Christian is ipso facto also a church musician,
but where musical talent comes within the life-stream of faith
and within the magnetic field of a true Christian community,
church music is born inevitably. The same can be said with
regard to the relation of faith and poetic form. All the great
prophets of Israel, from Amos to the anonymous writer of the
exile, were also great poets. The weakening of poetic power
goes hand in hand with the weakening of prophetic originality
in the later Old Testament prophets. There is hardly a word of
Jesus which is not a little poem and some of His parables are
poetry of the highest order. We can hardly imagine Luther's
prophetic genius apart from the powerful rhythm of his hymn,
" A mighty fortress is our God That is Luther ! Who is
able to delimit here prophetic faith and pontic expression?
Both are so united in this hymn that the power of faith and the
power of expression cannot be distinguished.

A similar relation is to be observed conversely: in respect
of impression. The religious hymn is not merely a necessary
expression of faith, but also an effective means of faith. It is as
if sacred music " tuned the soul " for faith. As the Marseil-
laise was a powerful factor in spreading the spirit of the French
Revolution, in a similar way really Christian music can kindle
faith. The music of Bach and Schutz has this effect, but not
that of Wagner. There are works of Bach to which, though
they are pure music without any text, one could add the
adequate Biblical words. We know by now that his most
abstract composition, Die Kunst der Fuge, is Christian theology
expressed in the form of immensely complicated fugues.

Something similar is a common experience in the sphere of
architecture. A Gothic cathedral generates a certain kind of
reverent feeling, without there being any direct indications of
the cultus. The very structure of the Gothic church, being an
expression of medieval religion and theology, impresses the
mind with that same spirit from which it originates. It is utterly

Vl] ^ RELIGION AND ART 8l

inept to build atl modern bank in Gothic style. If the so-
called Gothic civil architecture of the Middle Ages does not
have this character of dissonance, it is because in that era all life
was permeated by the spirit of its theology and piety. How far,
however, this Gothic structure is Christian, and how far
neoplatonic mysticism is its root, is another question.

If then there exists an indubitable relation between faith
and art on the side of expression as well as on that of impression,
we cannot avoid the question what the fate of art will be in a
thoroughly secularised society where faith has ceased to be a
formative factor. Indeed, this question is not merely academic
in our time. It would not be historically correct to claim, on the
basis of what has been said before, that the decline of religion
must necessarily carry with it the decay of art. History gives
many clear examples to the contrary. Greek art reached its
zenith at a time when religion had already begun to decay.
The same is true of Renaissance art in the 16th century, and
French painting was at its best in the age where positivist and
even materialist philosophy dominated. Again, a similar
observation can be made about German music from the time of
Mozart onwards, the only exception, confirming the rule, being
Bruckner. And if instead of speaking of epochs we think in
terms of individual artists, it would be hard to discover any
definite proportion between artistic power and perfection on the
one hand, and religious intensity on the other. Alongside
Michelangelo and Fra Angelico, we have Raphael, Leonardo
and Titian ; alongside Rembrandt, we have Peter Breughel and
Vermeer; alongside Bach, we have Gluck and Strauss, not
to speak of certain schools of first-rate art with a decidedly
frivolous concepdon of life as background.

Let us remember once more that Kunst comes from konnen,
that artistic genius is a natural disposition, and as such indiffer-
ent to religion or any philosophy of Hfe. Whether a man who
is born with creative genius is deeply religious or indifferent to
religion, does not in itself increase or diminish his creative
capacity. But in spite of this we venture to contend that in a
society where religious faith is dead, or has been dead for a

while, art also decays. It is difficult to prove ihis assertion from
history, because, whilst there have been times of religious
decline, there never has been an epoch of predominant atheism.
There may be one exception to this rule : our own age, as far as
certain countries are concerned. But this period has not yet
lasted long enough for us to draw definite conclusions. All the
same our assertion does not hang in the air, for there are strong
reasons for its validity.

Whilst it cannot be said that faith or religious power is a
necessary presupposition of art, two statements can hardly be
denied. First, that creative genius combined with religious depth
produces ultimate artistic possibilities which otherwise do not
exist. Secondly, no artistic life can thrive on dehumanised soil.
Where men are no longer capable of deep and great feelings,
where the spiritual horizon has lost infinity, where the under-
standing of life is devoid of all metaphysical or religious depth,
art cannot but degenerate to mere virtuosity, and creative
originality exhausts itself in inventions whicfi may be witty,
striking or pleasant, but which cannot move the depth of the
heart. The grand passions, which are the source of all genuine
art, are not a phenomenon of merely psychological dynamic.
Grand passions are not merely a matter of temperament or
instinct. Their greatness originates not from natural disposi-
tions but from spiritual tensions which do not exist any more
where thinking clings to the surface of things.

We touched on this point when we spoke about tragedy.
Christian faith in itself cannot accept the tragic view; but being
in itself the victory over tragedy, it presupposes the understand-
ing of the tragic. Where there is neither understanding of the
tragic nor Christian faith, where all relation to something trans-
cendent and absolute has disappeared, where crude naturalism
and materialism have taken the place of religion and meta-
physics, great passions, deep feelings and those mysterious
longings of the soul out of which great art is born, disappear
also. The decay of the truly human necessarily brings with it
the decay of beauty and mystery. This decay of the truly
human, however, cannot be avoided in a materialistic world.

VlJ RESPONSE TO SECULARISM &$

When man is cnjt off from the third dimension of depth, when
he lives on the surface of mere utility, animal instinct and
economic rationality, the element of humanity vanishes. This
assertion, I think, has been sufficiently proved in the first series
of these lectures.

We now are in a position to see the dual fact: art in its
dependence on, and its independence of, religion. The depend-
ence is absolute only in an indirect sense, relative and partial in
the direct sense. In so far as the depth of human existence is
founded ultimately in the " third dimension ", in religion and
metaphysics, and in so far as the Christian faith produces the
deepest and most human kind of existence, art is dependent on
it. In so far, however, as in the individual case and for a certain
time this deep humanity can exist after the faith which has
produced it, has disappeared, like an evening light after sunset,
like the marvellous Abendrot in our Swiss Alps, art can persist
for a certain wjiile in individuals or during a whole generation
after the sunset of faith. But this Abendrot cannot be of long
duration. The stock of human values created in a time of faith
is soon exhausted in a time of faithlessness and with it the possi-
bility of real art. The humanity of man is much more historical
than we usually think, and that is true of art.

I think we are justified in applying this general observation to
our time, although we have to do it with great caution. If what
I have just said is correct, we should expect that the secularisa-
tion of modern mankind — which, although fortunately not
complete, is the characteristic feature of the modern age — must
have its effects on art. And we should guess that this effect
must be a certain loss of depth and at the same time a tendency
in two directions : barbarism or crudeness as a result of the lost
distinction between man and animal nature on the one hand,
and a certain abstractness as a result of formalism, because of
the disappearance of metaphysical and religious content. Now,
with all the reserve which my little knowledge of contemporary
art puts upon me, I think that these tendencies are indeed quite
obvious in the artistic production of our time, although the
reaction against them is also to be felt, and in a quite remarkable

G

84 ART , [LEGT.

degree. But this reaction against barbarism ?!nd formalism is
at the same time also a reaction against secularisation and to
this extent proves our thesis.

Let me point out another feature of modern art which is a
necessary result of what I called the loss of the third dimension
of depth. Where men lose their religious faith, art is apt to
take the place of religion. That danger, which as we have just
seen is immanent in all art, becomes real. Art itself becomes
the highest value, aestheticism becomes the religion of the time.
It can hardly be denied that this is true for a good many of our
contemporaries. The imaginary perfection and elevation of
life which art gives them becomes a substitute for real salvation.
They live in their imaginary world of artistic creation as in a
sort of earthly heaven or paradise, measuring all life by their
art and artistic genius. If I am not wrong, this is one of the
elements which account for the sad condition of the French
nation. The prevalent aestheticism of French cultural life has
broken or at least seriously damaged its moral backbone. The
religion of art is a poor substitute for true religion as a basis of
civilisation.

Still, real faith has not vanished. On the contrary, it is just
in the sphere of modern art that we find, along with barbarism
and formalism, most impressive signs of a spiritual awakening
parallel to the reawakening of Christian theology and religious
philosophy. Perhaps we may venture to say that the art of our
time confirms what we have seen happening in other fields, that
the low point of the secularist movement is already passed. At
any rate, the battle is on and all of us are engaged in it.

To close— let me take up once more the question raised in
the beginning. Why do men create works of art? What is
the function of art in the human household? For the creative
artist himself this question hardly exists. To him art is a
" calling To some of the greatest artists it is a divine calling.
They follow an inward "must" which permits no further
derivation except the religious one. For most men, however,
who are not artists, but mere lovers of art, the answer is, from the
Christian point of view ; art is the noblest form of resting from

i

Vl] THE FUNCTION OF ART 85

the struggle of litfe, closely related with the quiet of the Sabbath
in the Biblical sense. All work, even the highest spiritual work,
produces a kind of hardness and cramp. The man who knows
nothing but work becomes soulless. Art is the noblest means
of re-creation. It cannot redeem our soul, but it can " tune the
heart", even for the highest: for communion with God. It
never produces or creates faith, but it can support the Word of
the Gospel, which creates faith. It can open the closed soul and
help it to relax in the most human way from the stress of every-
day life. That is why we sing in our church services and why
we should not underestimate the function of real church music.
But apart from this highest function, man needs relaxation,
especially if he is engaged in intellectual work. Art is the bene-
ficent mediator between spirit and sensuality. It is a spirituali-
sation of the sensual and the sensualisation of the spiritual. It
is a necessity primarily for those who do not live in immediate
contact with nature. Art is therefore, before all, a necessity for
the city man. What Luther and Bach have said of music is
true of all art: it is the servant of God to help his sorrowful
creatures, to give them joy worthy of their destiny.

VII

WEALTH

A LL civilisation is built upon material goods. So long as
l\ man lives " from hand to mouth so long as there are
M JLno permanent material goods and fixed property, civilisa-
tion cannot arise. Notwithstanding the moral and social
dangers of wealth and the acquisitive instinct, the fact remains
that higher civilisation presupposes a certain material wealth
and stable conditions of property. One cannot deny that
cultural life always has a certain bourgeois character. The
beginning of civilisation coincides with the transition from
nomadic life to agriculture and permanent residence. It is not
by mere chance that the word culture originates from agricul-
ture. Agriculture is the primary stage of man's mastery of
nature. Agriculture brings with it permanent and communal
residence and city-building, which in its turn involves the
crafts and division of labour. Division of labour again makes
possible barter and its rationalised form, money.

Of course, historically, the first property of man is neither
soil nor house nor money, but the tamed animal and the
weapon. The nomad is proprietor of his herds; this property
is, so to say, entirely natural. The struggle between mine and
thine, the problem of property, becomes acute only through the
competition for soil and particularly because of individual
agricultural property. On the other hand, the development of
individual personality seems to be closely related to individual
property. Where the peasant works a field that does not belong
to him, where he is not economically independent, he will
hardly become morally free. It is a law deeply rooted in man's
nature that man ought to be free to dispose of the produce of
his work, that its fruit " belongs " to him. Wherever this law
has been disregarded, as in the absentee-proprietorship of the

86

I

PERSONALITY AND PROPERTY 87

Roman Empire!^ this has been a cause of cultural decline.
Individual property is an important ethical value. We should
not forget, however, that what nowadays is called individual
property is of a very different nature. Modern individualism
has transformed the firm relation between man and " his " soil
into its very opposite, making agricultural soil an object of
capitalist speculation.

A similar relation to that which exists between man and soil
obtains also between man and his house and his tools. In order
to develop as a free personality, man must have certain things
that belong to him. It is true that even a slave — like Epictetus
— may consider himself a free man, as did the slaves of the New
Testament Church, considering themselves as free in Christ.
But as a general rule, the connection between individual pro-
perty and the development of free personality can hardly be
denied. A certain economic independence is a prerequisite of
free personality. Private, i.e. individual, property is recognised
in the Bible as a matter of course, although it is never considered
as an absolute right. It is limited by the idea of stewardship
under God and by the regard for the common good. The short
experiment of Christian communism in the community of
Jerusalem does not really form an exception, because everyone
was free to place at the disposal of the community whatever he
thought fit.

As has already been said, division of work, together with
permanent residence, makes possible barter and money. Money
is the abstract form of material goods. This abstraction, like
all abstraction, includes both great potentialities and great
dangers. With money you can buy everything : land, houses,
industrial products, and even labour. The economics of money
compared with barter may be compared to the relation between
algebra and simple arithmetic. Where money has become the
main material good, quantity tends to prevail over quality. The
desire for wealth becomes infinite, I cannot imagine an infinite
number of concrete material goods, but I can easily add an
indefinite number of ciphers to any given figure. That is why
money becomes a great danger to social life. In itself it is a

88 WEALTH [LECT.

most valuable invention, freeing the exehang^ of goods from
chance and other limitations and giving economic life a new
mobility.

Material property, necessary in itself, becomes deeply pro-
blematic through the sinful nature of man, in two respects:
first, with regard to the relation of material goods to other
values ; second, with regard to the relations between men. Let
us call the first danger practical materialism. In itself man's
desire to acquire property is necessary both for the individual
and for society. Cultural life can develop only where a certain
surplus of means beyond bare existence is granted. A nation
can apply itself to cultural production only where its energies
are not entirely occupied by the production of the necessities of
life. On the other hand, interest in material property tends to
become isolated and monopolistic. Instead of being a means of
life, wealth becomes the main aim. The necessary acquisitive
instinct degenerates into mammonism, money, the abstract
form of goods, playing a large part in this dangerous develop-
ment. The lust for property becomes particularly dangerous
when it is combined with the lust for power. Money becomes
the primary means of domination over others. And this is the
second form of the sinful development of material property.
Man wants to be wealthy at the cost of others, and he wants
to be wealthy in order to replace social responsibility by
domination.

These two negative aspects of material goods are as old as
civilisation. Their most primitive forms are theft and robbery;
their more refined, but not less pernicious, forms are unscrupu-
lous competition and exploitation, the use of power for material
advantage, and the use of money to wield power. The motive
of power has two aspects : people may desire material goods in
order to get power, or may use power in order to get material
goods. All these possibilities are realised even in the most
primitive civilisations. They have taken different shapes in the
various epochs with their different social, economic and political
structures, but basically they are always the same. It is of no
small importance to see this semper idem, because otherwise one

VIl] % MONEY AND CREDIT 89

is easily deluded^by slogans putting the blame on specific social
structures. Whether the economic structure is primarily agri-
cultural or industrial, whether it is characterised by barter,
money or credit, whether the political structure is monarchic,
aristocratic or democratic, we see always the terrific interplay of
man's lust for wealth, ruining his own soul and endangering the
life of his fellow men and general culture. On the other hand,
the identity of the basic forms should not make us overlook
differences arising from the various social, economic or political
structures.

We have already seen that money, the abstract material good,
accentuates certain evil developments, if not necessarily, at least
as a matter of fact. In a similar way we now have to think of
certain other factors tending in the same direction. Just as
money is an abstract form of barter, credit is an abstract form
of money. It is an abstraction of a higher order. In both
cases abstractym is in itself a positive factor; it widens out
the narrow limits of economic life, set by the more concrete
forms of goods. By credit one is enabled to work with the
money of others, paying them a certain interest as a reward for-
lending their money, or giving them shares proportional to
one's own gains. This expansion and intensification of economic
possibilities at first sight looks quite harmless and useful. But
upon closer inspection it carries with it great dangers. It creates
income without work on the one hand, and it separates economic
production from economic power. The non-working money-
giver controls the actual work and the distribution of its profit.

This new economic technique of the modern age, however,
reached its full importance only in combination with the
transition from craft to machine industry. The tool of the
craftsman is cheap and can be owned by anyone. The machine,
however, the factory, the industrial plant, is expensive; the
individual cannot afford it, he is dependent on credit. Indus-
trialisation is possible only in combination with credit, in its
two forms: interest-earning and share-taking credit. Herein
originates that system which we call capitalistic, and which at
first is a merely technical device that must be sharply distin-

90 WEALTH ' [LECT.

guished from what we call the '* capitalistic sp.rit Taken for
granted that all the persons concerned are good Christians, free
from greed or egoism, this capitalistic system combined with
industrialism would work for good. But just as money, the
abstract form of goods, brings with it danger, even more does
capitalistic credit become morally dangerous as soon as our
moral hypothesis ceases to hold. In its combination with
egoistic motives, this credit system becomes what is called
capitalism in the evil sense of the word. Why is that so?

First, in expanding the possibilities of profit-making, it also
intensifies the profit motive. This is the effect of the doubled
abstraction. Just as money can be more easily desired in
indefinite quantities than concrete goods, profit-bearing securities
can be more easily desired indefinitely than money. The pure
quantification of the material goods tends to unlimited desire.
Second, the development of the capitalist system means the
gradual separation of ownership of the fiools — machine,
factories, etc. — and actual working with those tools. It creates
dependent labour and independent capital. It is particularly
the absentee-owner, the anonymous shareholder who, not know-
ing those who actually do the work and their conditions, is free
from those moral inhibitions of the profit motive which are
likely to function wherever work is done in personal coopera-
tion. Third, the difference in economic power between the
dependent workmen and the independent proprietor of the
productive capital goes on increasing. Fourth, this economic
power, concentrated in a few hands, may become so great that
it can influence and perhaps even control political power. Big
business is an important factor in world politics.

So far, we have followed the analysis of capitalism given by
Karl Marx, which, generally speaking, is correct. But certain
corrections in his picture are necessary. Like his teachers of the
Manchester school of economics, Karl Marx also presupposes
the pure homo oeconomicus, taking for granted that the person
who has economic power will use it without any consideration
for the community or the human individual. This is wrong.
The sense of justice and human personality is an important

vii] m^vrx's "economic plan 55 91

element even in a^capitpdist society. Second, Karl Marx has not
taken account of the fact that through the trade-union move-
ment and state legislation the evil consequences of the capitalist
system can be and have been checked to a large extent. Capital-
ism in Marx's sense, i.e. unlimited exploitation of labour in the
exclusive interest of capital profit, hardly exists any more in
Western society. All the same, the moral dangers inherent in
the capitalist system have become and still are sinister realities :
tremendous intensification of the profit motive, increased
inequality with regard to property and power, social dis-
integration. There does exist what Karl Marx calls a "pro-
letariat ", i.e. enormous masses of men living under conditions
unworthy of and detrimental to human personality, as well as
to true community and spiritual cultural life.

The necessary reaction against this threat from above has
created what Karl Marx calls the class struggle, which, of course,
is not merely a Communist programme, but a double-sided fact,
poisoning and disintegrating society. The injustices inherent
in and produced by the capitalist system and the proletarian
disintegration of society have created a mentality within the
world of labour which makes men inclined to listen to the
slogans of totalitarian Communism, which in itself is the end
of free society and of human culture.

By all these factors the problem of material goods is accentu-
ated in a way unknown to previous ages, unknown particularly
to the time of Old and New Testament revelation. In the
teaching of the prophets, of Jesus, and of the apostles material
goods and property are regarded as natural consequences of
man's being a creature. The Bible is not ascetic, either in this
or in any other respect. In the Old Testament wealth is not
morally discredited : it is a divine gift and a manifestation of
God's blessing. But there already we do find a very critical
estimate both of acquisition of goods and of property. The
prophets in particular passionately denounced the egoistic
profit-motive, which makes men forget God and trample upon
their neighbours. They are uncompromising in passing»judg-
ment upon the mighty and wealthy who use their power to

92 WEALTH f [LECT.

exploit and enslave the powerless. In tfee New Testament this
critical attitude becomes even sharper, and wealth appears
almost exclusively as a negative value. It seems almost impos-
sible to be rich without forgetting the poor or without forgetting
God. The man who enjoys his wealth without being moved and
worried by the sight of poverty cannot be a disciple of Jesus.
But even there we do not find a general moral disqualification of
wealth or the postulate of poverty. The use which the medieval
theology made of Jesus' word to the rich young man is a mis-
understanding. There is nothing like a general precept or
" counsel " of poverty in the teaching of Jesus. Wealth is not in
itself evil, but its temptation is almost irresistible. While in the
church of Corinth there are " not many wealthy still there
are some, just as among those who followed Jesus there were
some who had means, without being blamed for it.

It is then very difficult, if not impossible, to gain direct norms
from the Bible for present-day problems of economic life, in so
far as they are predominandy structural. Attempts have been
made to derive from the Bible a general prohibition of interest,
and therefore a general opposition to the capitalist system. This
interpretation, however, identifies two fundamentally different
things : interest in the Old Testament sense, and interest as the
basis of the credit system, which is entirely unknown in the
Bible. To take interest from money lent to a neighbour who
is in need is a different thing from deriving interest from money
or credit given to someone who wants to make more money by
it. The prohibition of interest by the medieval Church has
nothing whatever to do with Biblical teaching.

On the other hand, it is obvious that in the age of technical
industry and the credit system the problem of material property
and acquisition is fundamentally different from what it was in
the time when the farmer, the craftsman and the travelling
merchant were the predominant figures of economic life.
Material property in the modern sense includes power over the
dependent non-proprietor and even power over the state
machinery. While power in itself is not morally evil, it becomes
evil almost inevitably through the possibility of misusing it.

VIl] CAPITALISM AND THE CHURCH 93

And this possibility a^ain becomes a fact almost inevitably if
we take men as they are. The concentration of power inherent
in the credit system is an enormous moral danger, both with
regard to the just distribution of goods and with regard to the
just distribution of economic responsibility and power.

This danger, however, can be and is checked by two counter-
forces which tend to create economic as well as political balance,
viz., by organised labour and by the equalising interference of
the state. Furthermore, it is checked by a third factor which is
often under-rated and even ridiculed, i.e. by spontaneous self-
limitation of those in whose hand is the main economic power.
Whether it is from fear of Communism or of organised labour,
or whether it comes from a real sense of justice and humani-
tarian motives, the so-called capitalists have learned to restrict
the use of their power. While, of course, this self -limitation is
far from having reached the necessary level, it is certain, on the
other hand, thaj without it things would be much worse. It is
here that the Christian Church has its most immediate field of
action, because within the Christian faith motive is more im-
portant than structure. Economic power is not necessarily used
unjustly, and therefore power is not in itself an evil, but a great
temptation. Where power is controlled by just and disinterested
motives, it does not lead to injustice and exploitation. A truly
ethical control of motives, wherever it does take place, is a surer
safeguard against injustice and selfish exploitation than any
structural, i.e. legal and political, control. The change of the
system is only a makeshift for the lacking ethical inhibitions in
the use of economic power. Wherever the working man is not
influenced by propagandist slogans, he does not resent the so-
called capitalistic system, if he is sure that the " boss " is truly
concerned about his welfare and led by the sense of justice and
loyalty. However, this obvious truth is limited by two facts :
first, that even the best-minded employer himself is part of a
system which limits his good intentions; second, by the fact
that with the development of big business the individual em-
ployer more and more disappears. The law of big numbers
makes itself felt and gives the moral problem of present-day

94 WEALTH

economy a particularly dark aspect. B<£caus$ the large majority
of capitalists are motivated much more by the profit motive than
by justice and goodwill, the capitalist system on the whole has
morally bad effects, and would have them much more without
the check of trade-unionism and state interference.

That is the reason why so many seek the solution of the
problem in a radical change of the system, in Communism or
— what is merely another name for the same thing — State
Socialism. They think that by such a structural change the
injustices connected with the capitalist system would disappear.
They postulate the nationalisation of all productive capital,
convinced that by this measure exploitation of the powerless
would be discarded and a just distribution of national income
would be safeguarded. This medicine, however, would prove
more dangerous than the sickness which it means to cure.
By nationalisation the whole of economy is politicised. Every
member of the working community becomes a functionary of the
state. It is inevitable that this politicisation of economy would
lead to the totalitarian state. Totalitarianism, however, means
the end of personal freedom, a soulless mechanical monster,
compared with which the evils of capitalism — great as they are
— must be called tolerable. It is an illusion that in a socialised
state economy exploitation disappears. The truth is that it is
shifted from the economic to the political field. The political
" commissar 99 takes the place of the economic " boss Political
bureaucratic hierarchy takes the place of economic competition.
It is a complete misunderstanding of human nature to think
that greed and lust for power would disappear in a fully state-
socialist society. The temptation to misuse power is nowhere
so great as in a totalitarian system, because the state machinery
cannot allow opposition or even criticism. In a completely
nationalised economy the individual worker loses his freedom
to choose his working- and living-place ; he becomes a state-slave.

We do well to remember Montesquieu's great discovery, the
system of " division of powers " embodying his idea : le pouvoir
atrite le pouvoir. Apart from the moral motive — which, as a
rule, proves to be weak in general— it is the only safeguard of

VIl] POLITICS AND ECONOMICS 95

justice. This principlejof Montesquieu presupposes a pluralist
structure. Thus Jar & misuse of capitalist power has been
checked by trade-unionism and democratic state interference.
Both contain reserves which are not yet tapped. There are still
great possibilities lying in the mechanisms of collective bargain-
ing and of education for mutual understanding between labour
and capital, in the further democratisation of economy, in a
revision of the legal status of corporations, and in the moderate
equalising function of the state. The alternative, "either
capitalism or state socialism is a product of propaganda, of
panic and of inadequate thinking.

As we have already said, from the Christian faith no direct
conclusions can be drawn for the solution of these complex
and abstract problems. We have to beware of the short cut, the
idea that a specific affinity exists between Christian community
and communism. Christian communalism is at the opposite ex-
treme from Stat^ Communism. It is the expression of spiritual
freedom. Nowhere in the Bible do we find the idea that cor-
porate or national property is better than individual property.
What we do find is the idea of stewardship and of social respon-
sibility. As we have already said, on the basis of Christianity
there cannot be absolute property, but only property regarded
as trusteeship under God. This trusteeship includes respon-
sibility for one's neighbour. The question, however, which
legal system is the best makeshift for those true ethical motives,
is never touched, just as the Bible does not say which form of
political government is the best to check the misuse of political
power.

Sometimes the abolition of the capitalistic system has been
postulated from merely economic motives which are only in an
indirect sense morally relevant. The idea was that only state-
planned economies can avoid unemployment and economic
crises. Certainly unemployment is a dreadful plague of modern
society, but it is an obvious error to think that state economy as
such would cure that disease. Economic crises could be avoided
by compulsory economic world-planning, i.e. by a world state;
but even then it is most doubtful whether it would have this

96 WEALTH [LEGT.

beneficial effect. On the contrary, it is WghJty probable that the
clumsy functioning of state machinery would be a cause of per-
manent economic crises. But even if we take it for granted that
nationalisation of industry and complete state control of
economics could liberate society from the evil of unemploy-
ment, this gain would be bought at too great a price, the loss
of economic freedom and, ultimately, of political freedom
as well.

Why is it that the idea of Communism or State Socialism has
captured the imagination of the working-class to such an extent
as is the case in our day? First, because the so-called free
economy of the Western world has failed to a large extent to
prove its capacity of providing for just distribution of national
income and property, and of giving the working-man an
adequate share in management. The Christian Church ought
to take a large share of responsibility for this tragic failure,
having omitted to instruct her lay-members atput their respon-
sibility for social justice and having accepted as a matter of
course the development of a kind of individualistic economy
which, at bottom, was irreconcilable with the Christian con-
ception of personality and community. The Church should
not, however, try to prove her repentance by supporting the
ideology and programme of State Socialism or Communism,
which would necessarily produce a kind of society in which not
only freedom, but justice also finds no place. Secondly, the
Communist or State-Socialist idea appeals to a mentality which
is almost exclusively fixed upon security and has lost the sense
of personal freedom. This mentality is the product of seculari-
sation, i.e. of the loss of spiritual values, particularly of the
Christian faith in which both personal dignity and communal
obligation are deeply rooted.

Thirdly, the Communistic or State-Socialist idea is the logical
consequence of an idea of man which identifies justice with
equality and has no comprehension whatever of the element of
subordination and differentiation which are inseparable from
any live social order. This egalitarianism has created a deep
resentment against anything which has even the faintest simi-

vn] * the'" third way" 97

larity with the famih) pattern of community. Of course
Christianity has failed" in supporting a kind of patriarchism
and paternalism which, in a technical world, could not but work
out in autocracy and economic tyranny. But the Church is
supremely right in affirming that the family pattern is the
Christian pattern of all social life. What needs to be seen is
that the family pattern must be interpreted and worked out in
our day in quite new forms, doing justice to the legitimate claim
of each member of the family to personal dignity and basic
independence. *

It is here that the Christian Church has a great task to fulfil.
The Christian conception of man stands above the false alter-
native of individualistic liberalism or capitalism and collecti-
vistic State Socialism or Communism. Christianity is absolutely
unique in presenting a conception of man in which true person-
ality and true community are not only firmly connected with one
another but, at J>ottom, identical. Wherever a community is
firmly grounded in Christian thinking, neither individualistic
capitalism nor collectivist Communism or State-Socialism are
possible. The " third way " is inherent in the Christian concep-
tion of man itself. That is why Christianity is called upon to
lead the way wherever the third way is seen as necessary and
wherever, out of economic life itself, new schemes of social order
emerge which are neither individualist nor collectivist.

At present collectivism is in the ascendent and individualism
is on the wane. Christianity has the historical task of raising
her voice against the great dangers for human personality as
well as for community implied in the collectivist scheme. It
can do so with even more conviction, since it is becoming
evident on experimental grounds that this is not a case of
striking the right mean between justice and freedom. In the
collectivist society the individual worker will get less than he
has at present in a society which has long ago ceased to be purely
capitalistic, less both in material reward for his work and in
political, social and cultural freedom. Collectivism means,
before all, enslavement; but it also means poverty. What is
encouraging for those who survey the present evolution in the

g8 WEALTH [LEGT.

social sphere is the fact that amongsfg those who used to be
Marxian Socialists a deep change is taking* place, away from
Marxism in its ideological as well as its economic and
political programme. There is an obvious convergence of the
thought and will of those who are trying to find a truly social
liberalism and those who are out for a truly liberal Socialism.
And it is certainly not by chance that where this reorientation
takes place a new openness of mind towards Christianity
becomes apparent.

Up to now we have been speaking of the problems arising from
differences of economic power. We have now to turn to the
other great problem, that of excessive valuation of material
goods as such. It is obvious that the capitalistic structure of
economic life has intensified the acquisitive instinct and
increased the striving for wealth. This practical materialism,
however, is unlikely to be discarded in a nationalised economy.
Against the auri sacra fames, State Socialist^ is no medicine.
The valuation of material goods is independent of legal structure
and depends on the whole conception of life. Greed, lust for
property, is the most direct manifestation of worldliness. The
man who does not believe in God and eternal life is likely to be
more intent upon material goods than the man to whom the word
" Seek ye first the kingdom of God " is a reality. Of course it
might be objected that many Christians have been misers and
profiteers. But let us beware of confusion; the man who is a
miser and profiteer is ipso facto not a real Christian. This
criterion is unmistakable in the New Testament. One might
even say it is the first criterion. He to whom God's Kingdom
is a reality cannot be a money hunter, and a money hunter
cannot take seriously the Kingdom of God. You cannot love
both God and Mammon. But where faith in God disappears,
the vacuum which it leaves has to be filled with something. It
need not be money. It may be a high spiritual good. But it
may be money, and it is very probable that in most cases
it is money which fills that vacuum. Spiritual goods are
rarely capable of filling the heart when the basis of spirituality,
God, has disappeared. Loss of faith usually means that

VIl] CALVIlAsTIC CAPITALISM 99

Mammon becomes Gc#. The practical materialism o£ the
Occident is a diredt anci provable consequence of secularisation.

We must say in this connection a few words about a famous
theory pointing in the opposite direction : Max Weber's thesis
about the connection between Calvinism and capitalism, which
was accepted and spread widely by Troeltsch and also, though
in a modified form, by Tawney. This theory seems to me a
very dangerous half-truth. It cannot be doubted that the
Calvinist-Puritan conception of the Christian life, according to
which the elect has to prove his election by his life, combined
with theXlalvinist emphasis on self -discipline and self-restraint,
has contributed to the formation of capital; more exactly, to an
increase of material goods which, not being consumed, were
available for the expansion of production. It is obvious that
these motives, combined with other factors, created conditions
favourable to the development of the capitalistic system. But at
the same time these motives were strictly opposed to what is
popularly called the capitalistic spirit. The true Calvinists and
Puritans were by no means money-grubbers, but energetic
business men who regarded themselves as stewards of God, and
therefore responsible to the community. It is not Calvinistic
faith but, on the contrary, the decline of this faith and pro-
gressive secularisation which led to the greediness which one
has in mind when speaking in a critical sense about capitalism.
The Quakers perhaps afford the best example. By thrift, sober
living, hard work, and indubitable honesty they became most
successful business men and acquired considerable wealth. They
did not, however, succumb to the capitalist spirit, but proved by
example that even within a capitalistic structure the relation
between labour and capital can be just and humane wherever the
power inherent in that system is not abused but used for good.

The capitalistic system, however, did not develop because of
men who worked much and saved the fruit of their work, but
because world trade and industry demanded the creation of
credit. There have always been hardworking and at the same
time thrifty people, before Calvinism and outside it. The parti-
cular development of the capitalist system in the so-called

H

100 WEALTH

Calvinist countries has very little to d| with Calvinism, and is
primarily due to the fact that these couhtriet' afforded the most
favourable conditions for world trade and industry, and that
they were populated by a type of people which in many other
respects proved to be particularly energetic. This view of
things is confirmed by the fact that the development of high
capitalism took place in an age when the Christian faith,
whether Calvinistic or not, was on the wane. It is the combina-
tion of the credit system and industrialism, with that mammonist
spirit which is the result of secularisation, that created the kind
of capitalism of which the Western world should be ashamed.
The tiny bit of truth lying in Weber's thesis is almost irrelevant
compared with the enormous confusion which it has produced
and the great injustice which it has done to Calvinist faith.

The economic problems, i.e. the problems connected with the
production and possession of material goods, have become so
portentous in our time because the development of world trade,
machine industry and the credit system took place in an age
when the Western world was beginning to lose its religious basis,
and when, therefore, money-making and the possession of money
seemed more important than anything else. Furthermore, this
development took place within a society in which an individual-
istic conception of life worked towards the dissolution of
community life. It can be easily understood that a society
which was about to lose its religious and moral basis was hardly
capable of solving the enormous social problems which the
industrial revolution and the break-down of the patriarchal
system had created. It can hardly be doubted that a truly
Christian society could have overcome these difficulties at an
earlier stage and would thus have prevented some of the worst
features of the present Western civilisation. For it is the
Christian faith that contains all the necessary forces of direction
and healing which are adequate even to a very dynamic econ-
omic life : a strong consciousness of personal responsibility and
freedom, the willingness to serve one's fellow man, and the limit-
ation of economic interest by the faith in a higher, eternal life.

VIII

SOCIAL CUSTOM 1 AND LAW

IN primitive society, as well as in antiquity and in the Middle
Ages, social custom (Sitte) and law can hardly be distin-
guished. In their conjunction they are the solid order of
life in which the individual is embedded; they are the skeleton,
the permanent constitution, for the behaviour of the individuals
and their mutual relations. Western society to-day is char-
acterised by an enormous decay of social custom and, as a
consequence, by an enormous increase of laws. The behaviour
of the individual nowadays is only to a very small degree
ordered by social custom, but to an increasing degree his free-
dom is limited by legal prescriptions. The causal relation
between the two facts is obvious : where social custom is strong,
only a minimum of legal prescription is necessary.

The destruction of social custom in modern times is closely
connected with the development of individualism. The in-
dividual wants to shape his life as it pleases him or as it seems
good to him. He does not want to be controlled by the anony-
mous power of social custom. He wants to have his liberty,
and he also wants to decide according to his own conscience.
The decay of social custom therefore is ambivalent ; it may be a
sign of spiritual and moral independence, or it may be a sign of
arbitrary subjectivism. In both cases it is the product of the
emancipation of the individual from collectivity. On the other
hand, it would be wrong to interpret the prevalence of social
custom as spiritual inferiority and a defective sense of respon-
sibility. Even a morally and spiritually mature man, who is
perfectly willing to take full responsibility for his life, can
acknowledge the necessity of social custom with regard to the
common welfare. He would attribute to it the same function

1 Sitte.
101

102 SOCIAL CUSTOM ANL> LAV/ [LECT.

for society as to mechanical habit in individual life. It relieves
life of unnecessary decisions and make! it free for decisions
where they are really necessary. It would be stupid to deny
the necessary function of individual habit. Without a great
number of such habits, life is impossible. The same, the mature
man might claim, is true of the function of social custom in
society. He would add a second argument : to acknowledge the
necessity of social custom is to acknowledge one's own limita-
tions. Social custom may express the wisdom of the generations
which is not consciously the wisdom of the individual. He
would add a third argument : that not all people, if any, reach
a state of complete moral maturity; and therefore people need
the support of firm social custom. The necessity of social
custom can be denied only by those who postulate that every
individual be spiritually and morally awake at every moment, or
who at least think that the absence of custom is more than com-
pensated by the gain in individual responsibility.

At first sight it might appear that New Testament Christian-
ity, which puts the highest obligation of personal responsibility
on the individual, and which believes in a continual guidance
by the Holy Spirit, would leave little room, if any, for social
custom. But this is not so. Good customs are acknowledged
and recommended; sometimes good custom is appealed to in
order to end discussion. On the other hand, the apostles warn
people against bad customs and demand a complete break with
them. Therefore the man who was converted to the Christian
faith had to break completely with pagan custom in order to
become a member of the Church. By this break a vacuum of
social custom was created. But this vacuum was filled by some-
thing else, by the order of life in the Christian community. This
Christian order of life was a new kind of social custom. A body
of rules, hardly conscious and never formulated, powerfully
shaped the life of the individual Christian; its origin could
hardly be traced and its necessity and rightfulness was never
questioned. The importance of such Christian social custom
in the early Church can harly be over-estimated. Certainly the
great moral teachers of the early Church whose writings we

VIIl] HABIT 103

know not only enjoined, but also verified and corrected, these
social habits of Ithe ^Christian community. The individual
Christian, however, did do, or abstained from doing, many
things differently from the rest of the world, for the sole reason
that this was the social habit of the Church.

Because social habit is formed unconsciously, and by its very
essence is beyond people's criticism, there is great danger of
every good custom degenerating into bad custom or into mere
convention. Furthermore, social habit sometimes has no other
purpose than effectively to separate one social class from another.
The Court nobility, the upper classes, develop special customs
and even complete codes of behaviour from the mere instinct of
exclusiveness. The function of these customs is to distinguish
those who belong to the upper circles, and so to prevent others
from intruding. In a similar way habits are formed in other
sections of society which for other reasons wish to be distin-
guished and separated from the rest. Where this becomes
conscious, such custom turns into a sort of private law.

Social habit is a most complex thing: primeval religious
customs long forgotten, political and military measures, obsolete
legal institutions, prescriptions of long abandoned techniques,
survive as social habits. "Everybody does it" — without knowing
why, even if it is apparently senseless. AH the same, this con-
servatism of social habit is not merely social inertia, but an
instinct for the preservative power and necessity of social habit
in general. It is an instinct for the necessity of a certain
irrational factor, of a rule of conduct, the meaning of which
cannot be thoroughly grasped. That is why the typically
enlightened man, who acknowledges as truth only what he can
himself understand, naturally despises and opposes social custom.
It seems to him unworthy to subject himself to a rule which he
does not thoroughly understand. The age of the Enlightenment
therefore was the time when social custom was cleared away,
just as, about the same period, the old fortifications and
towers of former centuries were cleared away in European
cities, because they were merely obstacles to modern traffic.
Indeed, how much old rubbish has been swept away since the

* r r

104 SOCIAL CUSTOM AND L AlW [LEC1.

Enlightenment I How much easier to purvey, and how much
lighter, are our modern cities! How much Snore rational life
has become!

If this parallel between architectural style and way of life
holds good, the comparison will not be entirely in favour of the
modem age. It can hardly be denied that the picture of a
modern city is characterised by a complete lack of character and
style. Architectural style is the expression of a common mind
and feeling. In the age of a great style, even the simple work-
man builds well. The style builds for him. There is a more
or less unconscious rule of building, directing the individual
builder. The same is true of social habit : the age without style
is also an age without custom. The individual is isolated, left
to himself; there is no direction, no aim to be unconsciously
followed. Everyone has to find his own style of life, and this is
simply beyond him. The philosophy of the Enlightenment,
being itself the heir of a great past, laid too heavy a burden upon
the individual. The 17th and 18th centuries could indulge in
an enthusiasm for freedom and emancipation without fearing
chaos, because there were still the powerful integrating forces of
the past, resisting chaotic dissolution. But in the 19th century
the social structure begins to fall to pieces, and social chaos is
waiting at the door which is opened in the 20th century; the
reaction has already set in, in the shape of totalitarian com-
pulsion.

In this present age, Western mankind vacillates between
complete social dissolution and complete compulsion. Social
custom as a uniting and controlling power has been reduced
almost to nothing, apart from small groups of society. The
individual is left to his own conscience and to his own good
pleasure. No way of conduct is marked out for him. He has
to decide for himself. Modern man has now begun to become
disinclined for this super-abundance of personal responsibility;
at the same time he is afraid of chaotic dissolution. From
extreme individualism he swings over to a collectivist totali-
tarianism, finding it either in the Roman Catholic Church or in
the Communist state. Protestantism, however, having identi-

VIIl] THE PROTESTANT VACUUM IO5

fied itself wrongly with individualism, is no longer regarded as
a spiritual powe£ providing social cohesion and direction,
because it was not capable of producing customs which would
direct the individual without absolutely binding him. There
is the same vacuum as in Protestant education, which we
discussed in a previous lecture.

The less social custom, the more compulsory law. This truth
needs no proof in the age of totalitarianism. Man, having lost
the sense of direction in a time of complete freedom, turns to
the opposite extreme, to that society in which everything is a
matter of compulsion. It must be acknowledged, however, that
the tremendous increase of the legal apparatus and the pro-
duction of laws has other causes as well. Modern economic life
has become so intense and complex that increased compulsory
regulation became inevitable. The fast-growing world-traffic
has made necessary, so to say, a universal traffic-police to lay
down compulsory rules of social life.

This quantitative increase in state regulation, however, is not
the only characteristic feature of recent times. Alongside it a
qualitative change of greater importance is taking place, by
which the totalitarian danger becomes imminent. In earlier
times common law was a pre-state element, a fixed social
relation. English common law is still independent of the state
on the one hand, and hardly distinguishable from social custom
on the other. For the Continental European of our time,
English common law and the whole legal practice of England
is very difficult to understand, because on the Continent common
law has been displaced by codified law; the only remainder of
common law there is what we call Gewohnheitsrecht (custom-
law). But neither the term " common law " nor Gewohnheits-
recht tells the whole truth. In the German word Recht there
is a reminiscence of the relation between law and justice or
righteousness, which is lacking in the word " law Common
law in the English sense can exist only because and so long as
there is a close relation between law and morality. On the other
hand, the expression Gewohnheitsrecht is inadequate, because it
is not a matter of mere custom, but of common moral conviction,

106 SOCIAL CUSTOM AN1* LAW [LECT.

In older times the legal sense or consciousness, what we call
Rechtsbewusstsein, was closely related to ( justice. Law had not
yet the formal technical character which it has now. That is
why the jurists of previous centuries could think of positive law
as being merely a special form of natural law, so that there could
be no real clash between the two. While the relation between
law and justice or morality was obvious and close, the relation
between law and state was much less obvious or acknowledged.
Certainly the authority of the state was even then necessary to
enforce law. But the king was rather the protector than the
creator of law. The power of the state stands behind the
common law to safeguard it, but law itself is, in principle, inde-
pendent of the state. The idea that only by the state does .a
rule become law is entirely foreign to the people of older times,
as it is still foreign to the English people.

Whatever may be the cause or causes of this change, the fact
is undeniable that on the Continent law is ur^erstood by the
jurists as meaning law of the state, and that the jurists consider
the state to be the only source of law. It is probably the fact of
the codification of common law in the early 19th century which
has contributed more than anything else to this unfortunate
development. In the same degree as law has been exclusively
linked up with the state, it has lost its connection with social
custom and morality. Everything which the state proclaims
as a rule is Recht, whatever its moral quality may be. And
nothing which the state does not proclaim as a rule is Recht,
however just it may be. The close connection between jus
naturale and jus divinum on the one hand and positive law on
the other is in that way completely denied and disrupted.

This change has a double consequence. The first is a formal-
istic conception and development of law. Everything which the
state declares to be a rule* — all administrative machinery and
procedure — is just as much law as those laws which order the
conduct of the citizens and upon which rests the distinction
between what is permitted and what is forbidden, what is lawful
and what is unlawful. What in older times was Recht as distin-
guished from Unrecht, " lawful " as distinguished from " unlaw-

VIIl] THE |rATE AS SOVREIGN 107

ful ", has now become a subordinate part of an immense body
of administrative rul^s and prescriptions for business transac-
tions. It is no more the content but the form which is decisive.
All rules and regulations which the state places upon the statute
book are considered as the one body of law; and thus the
conception of law is formalised, and has almost completely lost
its connection with justice and morality.

The second change is of even greater importance. Whatever
the state declares as law is Recht, even if it is the very opposite
of justice and morality. The state is no longer the protector, it is
now the producer of law. The state is no longer under the law,
but above it. As there is no law but that which the state gives,
there is also no law above the state, by which the state can be
called to account. There are no primary rights preceding the
laws of the state, no human rights which the state has to acknow-
ledge and which it cannot repeal. The state has become
sovereign in a jense which in the Middle Ages was sometimes
applied to the monarch: princeps legibus solutus. The state,
being the only source of law, cannot but be itself legibus solutus.
The state can declare as law whatever it likes, which means that
the formalism of the new conception of law includes or leads to
state absolutism. This new conception of law then has a marked
tendency to totalitarianism. The totalitarian state of our time
is the practical consequence of this development of the modern
conception of law. What is to be said from the Christian point
of view about this whole development of the conception of law?

Every reader of the Bible knows the close relation which
exists between law and the divine will. The conception of jus
divinum, divine law, is fundamental in Biblical thought. But if
we try to formulate more clearly what this divine law is which
so profoundly impresses us, particularly in the Old Testament,
we are confronted with a series of most difficult and confusing
questions. The jus divinum transcends all legal relations
between men, being also the basis of purely moral and religious
relations and conduct. In the Pauline concept of dikaiosyne
Theou the element of divine mercy and forgiveness is essential,
and the whole redemptive work of Christ is included. This

108 SOCIAL CUSTOM ANd!) LAW [LECT.

(

new " righteousness " is the norm and essence of that relation
between men which does not ask for jifeticelbut is based on
spontaneous love, that love which Jesus fn the Sermon on the
Mount opposes to the attitude dictated by mere justice. For the
same reason it is impossible, though it has so often been tried,
to make the Decalogue the basis for legal justice, because the
Decalogue is interpreted by our Lord to mean nothing else
than that free spontaneous love which transcends all require-
ments of mere justice. And finally, the attempt to derive the
divine law from the several codes of law in the Old Testament
proves to be not very successful, because these laws were given
to the people of Israel over more than a thousand years in its
specific historical situation, which is so entirely different from
ours.

As a matter of fact, the development of law and legal practice
in the Western Christian world has, on the whole, not followed
the line of biblicism, but has tried to make the jus divinum bear
upon the legal reality by the concept of jus naturale or lex
naturae; or, more exactly, by identifying this concept of ancient
philosophy and jurisprudence with the Christian idea of jus
divinum. During fifteen centuries this jus naturale, in its
Biblical or Christian interpretation, was the foundation of juri-
dical thinking in Europe, until in the age of the Enlightenment
the Christian interpretation was replaced by a rationalistic one,
and, in the time of romantic historicism and naturalistic
positivism, the whole idea of a jus naturale was abandoned, and
jurisprudence and political theory became devoid of any kind of
normative principle, law becoming a matter of mere political
power.

But this unfortunate development, resulting in the complete
dissolution of the idea of natural law, had its origin — partly at
least — in this concept itself, because from the beginning of its
Christian history a double uncertainty or confusion was con-
nected with it. First, it had never been made clear, either by
theologians or by jurists, what was the distinction between the
Christian and the pagan interpretation of lex naturae. Second,
it had never become clear how lex naturae as the principle of

VIIIJ |ATURAL LAW IO9

juridical law was distinguished from Christian love as the prin-
ciple of personal §condict. While it was certain that justice
was not the same thftig as love, nobody seemed to be cap-
able of giving a clear definition or a theological justification of
justice as distinct from love. It is here that our thinking has
to start.

What is justice as distinct from love? And what is its
theological foundation? Is there room for such justice within
a Christian conception of God and of life? It is true that Jesus,
laying down the rules of His kingdom, speaks of love only,
calling it the " better righteousness More than that, He
interprets this love in sharpest distinction from seeking one's
own rights, and from legalism. He does not, however, teach
His disciples not to respect the rights of others. The love which
He teaches includes this respect for our neighbours' rights,
while far transcending it. Love that would not first give the
other man whatjie has a right to claim is mere sentimentality,
and provokes resentment on the part of one's fellow man.
While love is higher than mere justice, it is inclusive of justice.
Love, then, presupposes justice. Because this is so, there must
be a divine norm for this justice, which therefore is the basis
also of all human law. What is this norm?

Whoever says that a thing is just or unjust is thinking of
something which belongs to man. Justice — in its distinction
from love — is identical with "belonging", and this "belong-
ing " is to be understood in a normative sense, independent of
human laws. Justice presupposes a divine order of belonging,
of whatever kind this belonging may be. This is the meaning
of lex naturae, both in the pre-Christian and in the Christian
sense. But within the Christian faith this order of belonging
is not an order of "nature" — in the pantheistic sense of the word
— but of God's creation. In creating anything, God gives it its
own shape; He defines what belongs to its " Tightness In
creating man, God says : " This and that belongs to man's life,
this and that must not be taken away from man, but must be
given to him. Man, whom I have created, has a claim to this
and that, because I created him with this and that. To give it

110 SOCIAL CUSTOM AN| LAW [LECT.

to him is just; not to give it to him is unjust/' The basis of
earthly justice, of legal order between m%i, isf God's creation of
man, in so far as it includes those thing^f which belong to man
and yet could, though unjustly, be taken away from him by his
fellow men. In other words, the basis of the Christian con-
ception of justice and law is the Christian conception of man.

And this is, as a matter of fact, what has been for centuries
the foundation of the Christian understanding of law and
justice; it is still that where it has not been destroyed or per-
verted by rationalism and — much worse — by naturalism and
sceptical relativism. It is the Christian conception of man as a
person, having from God's creation his divine origin and dignity,
a person destined to have communion with other persons, ^a
person-in-community. What distinguishes the legal structure
of the " Christian " West from antiquity and from the rest of
the world is this basic concept of person, this Biblical personal-
ism. It hardly needs to be said that this Christian element has
only been one of many which actually formed the laws and legal
practices of the Western world. But even where it has not been
dominant, it has still been effective as critical norm and standard.

The mere fact that we speak of " man thus ignoring all
differences of sex, age, race, class, etc., is a Christian heritage.
In law this idea of " man as such " is of immediate practical
importance, because it is on this idea that there rests what we'
call " equal right When we read in our Swiss constitution —
as probably in many others — " jeder Schweizer ist vor dem
Gesetze gleich V this is a direct consequence or application of
the Christian idea of man. Whatever may be the practical
legal consequences drawn from this principle, it is in itself a
factor of the first magnitude.

It is closely related to a second idea which has exactly the
same origin, the idea of " human rights It is only in quite
recent years that we have rediscovered the necessity and bearing
of this concept. By it we mean that there are things belonging
to man as such, rights which precede the state, which the state
has to acknowledge, but which it cannot create, " birthrights of

1 All Swiss are equal before the law.

VIIl] THE IDE^ OF <e HUMAN RIGHTS " III

manhood " founded on God's creation. It is this conception
which distinguishes th& lawful state from the totalitarian state.
In the moment when Siese aboriginal human rights are denied
or abolished by the staTe, the totalitarian state is there, at least
in principle. That is why in the preceding parts of this lecture
we have laid so much stress on the independence of law from
the state. The human rights precede the state in order of
dignity. The state is created for the protection of those human
rights which man has not from the state but from the Creator.

It is only fair to admit that this principle of human rights and
of the conception of " man as man " has its roots not only in the
Christian but also in the Stoic conception of man ; on that we
d^elt in a lecture of the first series. The difference between
the Stoic and Christian conceptions of " man as such however,
becomes clear in the fact that in Christian anthropology man is
not conceived of merely as an independent individual, but as a
" person-in-comig.unity While Stoic and modern rationalism
construed their philosophy of law and justice entirely from the
standpoint of individual personality and therefore influenced
the development of society in the direction of a thoroughgoing
individualism, the Christian conception of man is characterised
by a polarity of individual man and social community. There-
fore the function of law is to safeguard not merely the rights of
the individual, but at the same time those of the natural societies.
Over against Stoic — or modern — individualism the Christian
conception of justice stands for a communal personalism or, if
you like, a personalistic socialism, in which the rights of the
individual are limited by the rights of the community.

On the other hand, this limitation of the individual by the
community is entirely different from, and strictly opposed to,
collectivist subordination of the individual, particularly under
the state. The human person, and man's personal rights, are
derived from the same source as those of the communities. The
individual is not a mere function or functionary of the com-
munity, of the state, but has his fundamental independence. In
this respect the Christian conception of man, however different
from individualistic liberalism, stands firm on the side of

112 SOCIAL CUSTOM ANp LAW [LECI\

liberalism against all attempts of anonymous society or tyran-
nical state to degrade the person into^a rqere instrument of
collective power. t

There is, however, an even deeper root of Christian opposition
to all kinds of tyranny: the principle of divine sovereignty.
The first pronouncement about " belongings " or " rights " is
this: that all things belong to God. The jus divinum is not in
the first place the right which God gives, but the right which
God has, and this right alone is absolute. The phrase which we
read at the beginning of books printed in Great Britain, " All
rights reserved " is— in its most serious and literal sense — what
the principle of the Divine Sovereignty means. By it all human
rights are— if I may use this ugly word—de-absolutised. Wl$e
they are given by God, they are nevertheless not absolute. This
principle of God's sovereignty is the surest, and in fact the only,
safeguard against two great dangers : a false absolutism of the
sovereignty of the people, leading to anarchy, and a false
absolutism of the sovereignty of the state, leading to totalitarian-
ism. It is no chance, then, that in an age which has largely
forgotten the meaning of the sovereignty of God, mankind is
wavering between these two evils, anarchic dissolution of law
and order, and tyrannical totalitarian order.

The recognition of the sovereignty of God is, however, also a
safeguard against a false absolutism of law itself. However
firmly grounded these laws may be and must be, above all of
them we read that inscription : " All rights reserved There is
no absolute human justice. There is no absolute human law.
Therefore we should not attempt what the rationalist philoso-
phers of natural law attempted: to deduce from the first
principles of justice a whole system of laws of timeless validity.
Human life, as seen by the Christian, is characterised by twc
traits which make .this impossible, its transitoriness and its
sinfulness. What was just yesterday may be unjust to-morrow,
because of changed conditions. What might be just for people
who are " angels " may be thoroughly unjust for people who are
sinners. There is no possibility of construing a perfect order of
law and justice from a few given principles.

VIIl] kEL ACTIVITY OF JUSTICE 113

The mistrust of all over-systematic doctrines of law and justice
is well grounded, and^ve praise the English for their instinct in
this matter. But # thisfcharacter of English legal tradition, which
to us Continentals islat the same time so confusing and so
attractive, is immune against a most deadly relativism only by
reason of the strong infiltration of the jus divinum of the
Christian tradition, and by the fact that the Christian conception
of man is still alive.

There are two errors to be guarded against : deductive a priori
constructions of systems, and relativistic opportunism. If we
look back over the history of European law, we can observe
quite distinctly that so long as Christian tradition was truly alive
and dominant, there were no such systems of law as began to be
developed by the rationalists of the 18th century. To-day,
however, the second danger is much greater: that all divine
foundation, norm, and sanction of law should disappear in the
general trend of relativism and naturalism. The positivistic
school of law, which has prevailed in Europe for almost a cen-
tury, is largely responsible for the legal chaos and the totalitarian
monstrosity.

There is one last reason why we need a foundation of law in
the jus divinum. Only where a glimmer of divine light shines
through the legal order of a nation can spontaneous obedience
be expected. Where the opinion becomes prevalent that law is
nothing but human invention, a sum of decisions taken by
political powers, or where the justice of the law disappears under
an immensity of technical regulations, the people will not obey
law spontaneously, but only because and in so far as they are
afraid of enforcement. And where this condition prevails,
more and more laws have to be made and more and more force
must be used. We can escape the totalitarian state machinery
only by the vigour of spontaneous obedience, and therefore only
by a sense of the sacredness of the legal order. Happy that
people which can count upon this attitude of free obedience;
and woe to that people which has lost it.

IX

POWER

AS the word "power" has many meanings, we want to
/-% make plain from the start that by power we here under-
-Z. A* stand the capacity of man to determine the life, i.e. the
doing and the not-doing, of others, by compulsion. In a very
strict sense, compulsion is impossible; even the mightiest and
most cruel tyrant can compel no one to do his will, if the othfg
man does not want to obey, but rather suffers the consequences
of disobedience. In our time, however, scientific cruelty has
brought us near the point where even this last resort of human
freedom is eliminated. But in that case man as a human being
is also eliminated and turned into an automaton.

Apart from these two extremes, compulsion can be exerted by
many means, and the sum of these available means we call
power. A father can compel his children because they are
dependent on him, or because he is physically stronger, or
because his parental authority is granted by law and state. A
teacher has power over his pupils, the " boss " has power over
his employees, an officer over his men, a judge over the culprit.
In a well-ordered state, the judge can be sure that the state will
use all its means of compulsion in order to guarantee the carry-
ing out of his sentence. The state has power over every single
citizen and over every group of citizens. It can compel them to
do what they do not like doing. The great powers amongst the
nations are those that can, if they wish, subjugate the small ones
to their will, either directly or indirectly. To have power does
not necessarily mean to use it, though its mere existence has an
effect similar to its actual use wherever it is uncertain how this
power will be used.

Power over others is desired by most men for two reasons.
First, power over another man is, so to say, a reduplication of

AN ESSENTIAL DEFINITION II5

!

one's own existence. Instead of one, I have two human
organisms at my disposal. I can make the other work and live
for me without worryii 1g about his life beyond his utility for me.
The second reason is u£ a more inward nature. Power means
also enhancement of value, prestige, whether in my own esti-
mation or in that of others. We therefore understand why men
desire power, and why few who have it abstain from using it,
whether in the first, more objective, or in the second, more
subjective, sense.

Power is the more desirable as the goods of this world are
already portioned out, because by power this distribution can be
changed in favour of the one who has power. That is why a
lajge part of human life is a struggle for power or the use of
power in the struggle for goods. This power and its use can
take various shapes. Everything by which the capacity to
compel is increased can become a means of power: bodily
strength and ability, shrewdness in putting one's own superiority
into action in t&e right place, possession of things that others
must have or desire to have ,* and these things can be of the most
different kinds : economic goods, the keys of Heaven or doors to
the high places in society or state. It is impossible to separate
physical power from spiritual, even with regard to compulsion.
The power of the state, for instance, by which it can compel the
citizens, is not merely, nor even predominantly, the police and
military force which stand behind its commands ; it is composed
of innumerable factors, the sum of which may be called the
spiritual authority of the state.

Because power is the capacity to compel, it stands in direct
opposition to freedom. The power of one over the other is the
dependence of the second on the first. Power and freedom are
related as the convex to the concave. The surplus of freedom
of the one, which is power, is the deficit of freedom of the other.
Power creates dependence. But not all dependence is created by
power, because there exists also dependence out of free will.
Furthermore, a dependence created by power may become
spontaneous. The good citizen of a good state wants the state
to be powerful. He accepts its compulsive power with his free

1

Il6 POWER [LECT.

will. The freely chosen leader of a group has power which the
group accepts and which therefore is not felt as compulsion.
This freely willed power must not be a nfused with a merely
psychic dependence or bondage, which is a strange mixture of
acceptance and refusal of power.

Because power, taken by itself, is opposed to freedom, there is
a tendency in every society to order and to canalise power in
order to limit its danger for the less powerful. The most im-
portant means to order power is law, which in itself is nothing
but " ordered power " or " order of power It is a necessity of
civilised life that the ultimate use of power, the power over the
lives of others, be centralised. This centralisation of ultimate
power is the state. It originates from the necessity to locafoe
ultimate power in a few hands and to canalise it by certain rules.
What we call state is the centralised monopoly of exerting ulti-
mate power. Power, not merely social organisation, is the
characteristic essence of the state. The social organisation oi
society is in itself something very " harmless The state, how-
ever, begins at the moment when this harmlessness disappears
i.e. when behind this social organisation an institution stands
with ultimate power, power over men's lives. This instrument
the state, is necessary as a safeguard of peace because it is onlj
this monopoly of ultimate power that checks the tendency oi
men to use their powers to the utmost limit for their own benefit
up to the point of killing. The will-to-power, and recklessness ir
using it are so strong in man that again and again he does no-
hesitate to kill. Until this possibility is taken away by th<
monopoly of ultimate power by the state, peaceful civilised lifi
cannot develop. In this sense the state is the presupposition o:
cultural life.

This centralisation of ultimate power in the state, however, i
only one step in taming the dangerous power-element. Th<
second step is the ordering of centralised power by law. Ulti
mate power and the power of the state in general must be exertec
only within definite limits, and for definite purposes, and in *
definite manner. The power of the state should only be usee
in the service of the life of the people and in defence of thei

1X1 PUBLIC AND PRIVATE LAW H7

rights. The state must be the guarantee of peace, order and
justice. We have^ see*| in the preceding lecture that the state is
not the source of law, i|>ut rather its guarantee. The state is the
servant of man and ilot their master. Its raison d'etre is to
protect the lives and the rights of men. That is why the mono-
poly of ultimate power is given to it. State-law is primarily law
for the state and not law of the state. State-law is the limitation
and canalisation of the power of the state. We call it public
law, in distinction from private law, which the power of the
state has to protect. It is by public law that society orders and
disciplines the dangerous, though necessary, power of the state
which is monopolised ultimate power. The rights of individuals
a»d their lawful relations are not created by the state, but they
are publicly acknowledged and protected by the coercive power
of the state.

A third step, however, is necessary in order to guarantee this
purpose of the^tate. This third step is the plurality of the
bearers of power in the state what we call the division of power.
This was the meaning in creating parliament, and this also was
the meaning of a much older institution : courts independent o£
government. The absolute monarch united all state functions
in his person. He was ruler, law-giver and judge. Yet the
principle of " division of powers " is much older than Montes-
quieu ; Montesquieu was merely the first who clearly recognised
its importance. Already in the people of Israel there existed
a certain division of powers; law was not given by the king,
but by God through prophets and priests, and the king had to
obey and to protect this law. The Roman Republic represents
a well-thought-out division of powers, which was the result of
century-long struggles. Montesquieu's principle, le pouvoir
arrete le pouvoir, is the most essential element of a constitutional
state, as distinct from absolutism and tyranny.

Whilst it would not be true to the facts to claim that the
conception of power set forth in the preceding pages is ex-
clusively Christian, it certainly is deeply rooted in the Christian
faith. The sovereignty of God excludes an absolute of human
power. It excludes both the absolute sovereignty of the

Il8 POWER [LEGT.

state and the absolute sovereignty of the people. All human
sovereignty is limited by divine sovereignty ajnd by divine law.
Furthermore, the Christian conception' of sin reveals the
dangers inherent in power. The Christian knows better than
anyone else the temptation to misuse which is inherent in great
power. Power is misused wherever it is used against the law of
God and contrary to its God-given purpose.

When St. Paul deduces the power of the state from^divine
order and enjoins Christians to obey it, he is not thinking of the
absolute sovereignty of state or monarch. The divine origin of
the power of the state (exousia) is at the same time divir&j limita-
tion. According to St. Paul this limitation is given with the
purpose of the state, which is peace and justice. In stressing tfe
power of the sword as a means of divine vengeance St. Paul
gives that interpretation of the state as monopolised ultimate
power which we have just been sketching. By this reference to
the power of the sword the state is not reduced to the police
function as has often been said. This reference to the sword is
rather an expression of Biblical realism with regard to the basic
elements of the state. It shows that the monopoly of ultimate
power is the very essence of the state, as a basis for peaceful
civilised life. This conception of state and power is correlative
with the Biblical conception of sin. Wherever the power of sin
and the temptation to sin, inherent in power, is seen, it becomes
impossible to regard the state as a mere social organisation, as
is done on the basis of an optimistic view of the nature of man.

The need for the concentration and canalisation of power in
the state is so much the greater as there are great accumulations
of power within society. Society does not consist of individuals
merely, but of groups, some of which wield tremendous power.
In our capitalist age there are concentrations of financial and
industrial power, compared with which the individual is power-
less. The credit system, combined with industrialisation, has
produced an accumulation of economic power unknown in
previous times : " big business mammoth corporations con-
trolling billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of men,
capable of limiting their freedom in a large measure, dominating

IX] THE PAULINE DOCTRINE 1 19

the" economic life and welfare of whole nations, and influencing
the state machinery i#l a dangerously high degree. By theijr
more or less monopolistic character, they exert an almost
state-like coercive powir.

This, however, is only one side of the picture. On the other
side we see accumulations of power created by organisation of
those who individually are powerless, i.e. the ever-growing power
of trade unions and trade-union associations which in some
countries has become equal to that of their capitalistic counter-
parts. Experience has proved that the great numbers of men
associated in an organisation are at least equal in power to great
wealth and, in the long run, even superior. By the development
o£»these two concentrations of power, a new danger originates.
These colossi, both business corporations and trade-union
federations, have become, so to say, states within the state,
being capable of challenging the state and thereby endangering
its primary purpose. The purpose of the state is to serve the
interests of all. Those economic mammoth organisations,
however, are so powerful that they are able to force the state
to do their will against public welfare. This situation explains
in part why so many are intent upon strengthening the economic
power of the state and are calling for a general state-control and
even nationalisation of economy.

The last decades, however, have confronted us with a pheno-
menon more dangerous than any other to freedom and general
welfare: the totalitarian state. The more comprehensive the
state, the more dangerous its power. The democratic and
liberal movement sprang from the desire to combat the danger
that lay in state absolutism at a time when state absolutism was
represented by the absolute monarch. Parliament and constitu-
tional government were an efEective attempt to bridle it. Since
then monarchy has either disappeared or been eliminated as the
bearer of power. Since the French Revolution the democratic
principle of the " sovereignty of the people " has conquered the
Western world. The rise of the totalitarian state — beginning
in 1917 — created a new situation. It is only now that we are
beginning to see that the sovereignty of the people, manifesting

120 POWER [LECT.

itself in the election of the government by the people, is not in
itself a safe guarantee against a new kimd of state absolutism.
It is possible to conceive a totalitarian /'state on a democratic
basis. To think of democracy and totalitarianism as opposites
is just as wrong as to identify totalitarianism with dictatorship.
State-totalitarianism is not a form of government. The form of
a state decides how and by whom political power is to be wielded.
Totalitarianism, however, means die extension of political power
over the totality of life whatever may be the form of govern-
ment. The nationalisation of economy is the decisive step to
this totality of political control over the totality of life. If
neither individuals nor groups have independent economic
means, they do not have real political freedom. If everyone ira
functionary of the state, and if nobody can make his living in-
dependently of the state machinery, if there are no other than
state schools, if the press, the cinema, the radio, are state con-
trolled, free society is lost, opposition and public expression
of independent opinion become impossible. Every deviation
from the programme of the state becomes rebellion and sabotage.
Even if this state has a democratic form, i.e. government
elected by the majority vote of the people, it amounts to a
complete suppression of liberty, and it will not be long before
even the so-called free elections become illusory, the state
machinery controlling all means of propaganda.

Compared with this modern totalitarian state, the absolute
monarchy of old times looks rather innocent, because even under
the most absolute monarch private property of individuals and
groups, and the absence of state-controlled education and public
opinion, left a considerable area open for free decision. In the
totalitarian state, however, this area of free decision hardly
exists, and therefore a free development of cultural life is almost
totally excluded. For cultural self-expression is dependent on
material means, and all these material means are in the hands
of the state. To take one example : if the state decides who is
to get the paper available for printing, can we believe that an
opposition press could exist? The totalitarian state even con-
trols the time of every individual citizen. No one can say : I

IX] MODERN ABSOLUTISM 121

prefer to earn less in order to have time for this or that cultural,
moral or religious activity. State economy can exist only if it
has complete control of the working time of everybody.
Furthermore, it is the Itate that dictates for what things money
may be or may not be spent. It not only controls schools and
universities, but also the schools and exhibitions of art, and the
theatre, all artists and actors being state employees. While in
theory it is not forbidden to do, apart from matters of national
importance, whatever one likes, this theoretical freedom is
illusory, because it is the state alone which has the financial
means necessary for any cultural activity. All this means that
totalitarianism, even in a democratic form, is the grave of
feaedom.

Furthermore, even a democratic totalitarian state must
necessarily degenerate because its power is unlimited. It
produces an all-powerful bureaucracy of functionaries and a
semi-militaristic^ hierarchy. This hierarchy necessarily has a
monarchical top. The principle of the division of power
becomes illusory. Its place is taken by the rivalry of the
different sections of the state machinery, but all of them are
dependent on the self-same pinnacle of the bureaucratic
hierarchy. The democratic drama will still be played while
actually there is a tyrannical dictatorship. All this is not
merely a description of one of the totalitarian systems of the
present time : these things are all the necessary and inevitable
results of the complete nationalisation of economy. We have
seen in recent years how — whether we like it or not — a war-time
economy produces almost necessarily the worst features of
totalitarianism : secret police, administrative jurisdiction, control
of public opinion, etc., and that even within states with deeply
rooted democratic tradition and with democratic institutions
intact, complete state control of economy leads to the militarisa-
tion of the life of a nation.

For all these reasons the totalitarian state, being the absolute
maximum of accumulated power, is the worst and most dan-
gerous social evil which we can conceive. It is the Satanic
incarnation of our time. Whatever analogies totalitarianism

122 POWER [lECT,

may have had in previous centuries, real totalitarianism has
become possible only in our age, in which £he techniques of
production and transport, the aeroplane, the radio and the
machine-gun, have made state power omnipresent, all-powerful
and all-pervasive.

We have now to turn to a last and no less gloomy aspect of the
power problem: the power-relation between the states. Man-
kind has somehow succeeded in eliminating the most destructive
effects of power within a given territory by concentrating
ultimate power in the state. Man has succeeded furthermore
in bridling the state-power itself by law and constitutional
division of power. In recent times, however, the formation of
a few powerful states has created a new problem : the struggle
for power between the major states, endangering the life and
freedom of humanity. Thus far all attempts to bring the
power-relations of the states under the control of justice and
humanitarian interests have been almost without effect.

It may be said that in times when the divine law and the
moral order exerted considerable influence on the nations and
their rulers, this purely spiritual limitation of power exerted a
certain smoothing and muffling influence. The states, however
ruthless in their international behaviour, did not quite do every-
thing lying within their power. By treaties they created a kind
of international law, which proved effective to a certain extent,
although its effects were limited by the fact that the treaties
could not be enforced. For this reason modern man created
institutions of international justice and peace, like the Court of
the Hague, and the League of Nations, which were intended to
replace the use of power by law. These institutions, however,
proved incapable of solving the most important and dangerous
conflicts arising from the dynamic character of history because
they were limited by the principle of the sovereignty of the
individual states. The League of Nations was certainly an
attempt to limit individual state sovereignty by a supra-national
federal structure. But this attempt proved futile because the
great powers did not really intend to abandon their sovereignty
to the will of the federation, and because some of the most

IX] INTERNATIONAL ANARCHY 123

powerful states were not members of the League. Horrified by
the disastrous results of the second world war, the nations made
a second attempt m the same direction by forming the United
Nations Organisation. t Although only a few years have elapsed
since its formation, it must be admitted that this second attempt
has also failed for the present. A condition of international
anarchy therefore still prevails, leaving the feeble nation at the
mercy ^of the powerful, and threatening humanity with a new
conflagration which, should it become a reality, would most
probably mean the end of human civilisation.

There remains the question of a world state. Why should it
not be possible to overcome world-wide international anarchy
ir&a way similar to that in which it has been overcome within a
given territory by the little Swiss or by the big American
federation, which combine regional autonomy with the over-
arching supremacy of the federation? Apart from the fact that
such a proposals purely academic for the present and for the
near future, the question remains whether such a universal world
state, having the monopoly of ultimate power, would not be the
greatest danger to freedom and higher culture. Only a federal
structure, combined with a strict division of powers, would
prevent it from degenerating into tyranny. A centralised non-
federative, or, if I may use the phrase, a monolithic, world state
would necessarily become a monster power of totalitarian
character, whereas a federal structure always involves a certain
risk for the peace of the world.

A truly Christian solution of the power problem, in either its
economic, political or international aspect, does not seem to be a
realistic prospect. The idea of a reign of peace and justice, in
which the lust for power would not only be tamed, but be over-
come from within, cannot materialise in a world of sinful men.
There are not a few who do believe in such an earthly paradise.
Probably they do not realise that such a hope implies one of two
things. Either they have to assume that within this temporal
world sin, that is lust for power, can be overcome, or they do
not see that real peace is irreconcilable with sin. Both these
views contradict the Christian conception of man and history.

124 POWER [LEGT.

Because as Christians we see the close connection between power
and sin, we accept St. Paul's idea that only by monopolised
ultimate power, i.e. by the state, can sinful" anarchy be overcome.
Whether it will be possible at some time to overcome the
anarchy between the powerful states themselves by subordinat-
ing them to a super-power without endangering justice and
freedom, we cannot know, though we may hope for it.

A short word may be added about the relation between power
and culture. We cannot follow Jakob Burckhardt, who in his
Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen opposes power to culture and
makes culture, so to speak, the innocent martyr of power. How
often has it happened that the most generous patrons of science
and art have been also most ruthless in their power politks,
misusing their power. It is not culture, it is only respect for
justice, love, and reverence for the divine law, that are capable
of overcoming the lust for and the misuse of power. It is only
that mind which would rather suffer an injustice than perform
it, and which is willing to " overcome evil with good that is
capable of resisting the temptation even of very great power.
The greater the power, the greater the temptation of being god-
like. Against this temptation no education or culture can
prevail. The demon of power is overcome only by Jesus Christ.
Therefore the most important thing that can be done at any
rime against the evil effects of the power motive is the spreading
and deepening of true Christ-discipleship. The most dreadful
thing, however, is the will-to-power in a Christian disguise, of
which Western history is full. It is here, if anywhere, that we
can see the cunning of the devilish power taking the shape of an
angel of light, and thereby hiding the One who alone is capable
of driving out the spirit of power.

We started our discussion with a definition of power, limiting
its meaning to " the capacity to compel We said that this
use of the word was not the only possible one. We speak now of
power in a sense which is far removed from this one. The
multiplicity of meanings is not a matter of mere chance. Power
in the most general sense is that which is capable of moving,
particularly of moving us human creatures. There is a kind of

%

IX] OVERCOMING EVIL WITH GOOD 125

power which moves us not by compulsion but by conviction.
An idea may prove powerful— idee force. Such power, while it
moves us, does not impinge upon our free action. On the con-
trary, such power makls us free. As Christians we speak of the
power of God moving us by His spirit of truth and holy love.
The apostles preached the gospel of Christ as the saving power
of the world, as that power which beyond all others makes man
free, giving him and revealing to him the truth of his own being,
creating him as a free personality.

Christianity has proved a power in history. The gospel
moved men to do what had never been done before and to refrain
from doing what had always been done before ; it moved them
tomiS.tr and to love, to rise above the level of the all-too-human
and yet to remain human, nay, to become truly human by love
and obedience to the divine will. Wherever the Christian faith
in its New Testament purity has been present in individuals, in
groups, in peopjf s, new things have happened, by the power of
God. The greatest proof of this power of God is that it over-
comes the lust for power, and thereby becomes a genuinely new
factor in political life. Whether this happens very often or not
is not the immediate question. We know, both from the teach-
ing of the New Testament and from Christian experience, that
wherever Christian faith is alive this does happen, sometimes
in a lesser, sometimes in a higher, and sometimes in the
highest and most conspicuous degree. And this is therefore the
one bright feature in the picture : that Christian faith, love of
God, and love of one's fellow man, does act as a political factor
inasmuch as it works against the misuse of political power and
works for that use of political power which is for the common
good. It is natural, it is even inevitable, for Christians to hope
that the influence of this Christian motive may become so great
that solutions of political power problems which otherwise are
insoluble become possible.

In the field of political action — which is a field of dynamics —
numbers count, and therefore combination of human wills for
concerted action counts. The Christian community or Church
has in itself a principle of community inseparable from Christian

126 POWER

faith. It has therefore a chance in the political field — in the
field of " power in the first sense of the word — to influence the
course of history, provided that it is pure, strong and united.
If it is not pure, it will become powerful ki the had sense of the
word, and will lust for that power ; if it is not strong, it cannot
compete in the field where power is decisive; if it is not united,
it has little chance to influence the political course of history.
There is no reason to deny the possibility that the Christian
faith, in its original purity and unity and strength, mighf again
become such a reality that it could change the gloomy picture of
the political scene. There is every reason for Christians to pray
and to work that this may happen, because unless it does happen
it is most probable that the prospects of our civilisation wll
become gloomier still.

X

THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF CIVILISATION AND
CULTURE

WfE have spoken so far, in the first series of these lectures,
about the foundation of civilisation, and in the earlier
lectures* of this series about some spheres of civilised
or cultural life. We now go back to the question with which we
started: what is a Christian civilisation? We have seen how
problematic this concept is. We have stated that there never
was in a strict sense a Christian civilisation, and that what is
usually called by that name is a compromise between Christian
and non-Christian forces. We have now come to the point where
it may be possible to sketch something like the Christian idea of
civilisation or culture. By the two terms, civilisation and
culture, we understand something typically and exclusively
human; man alone is capable of producing it. Whatever
astonishing analogies may be found in the life of animals — the
beaver-dam, the state of the ants, the so-called language and
games of the animals — they are mere analogies and not begin-
nings of cultured and civilised life because they are all tied to
biological necessities, as nourishment, procreation and shelter.
Man alone can transcend these necessities by his creative
imagination, and by the idea of something which is not yet but
ought to be; by the ideas of the good, of justice, beauty, perfec-
tion, holiness and infinitude. It is true that even human
civilisation and culture are related to biological necessity and
have their basis within natural organic life which is common to
us and the animals. But even where man is tied to biological
necessity he acts in a way which transcends mere utility and
gives his doings a human stamp. He does not " feed " like the
animals, he eats; he ornaments his vessels, his instruments, his
house, he establishes and observes fine customs, he explores

127

128 CHRISTIAN CIVILISATION AND CULTURE [LECT.

truth irrespective of utility, he creates beautiful things for the
sheer joy of beauty. He orders his relations according to ideas
of justice and liberty. He masters power by law, he sacrifices
time, energy and life for ideas and ideals. All this is civilisa-
tion and culture. Therefore we can define them as that
formation of human life which has its origin not in mere
biological necessity but in spiritual impulses. Wherever spirit,
transcending the physical urge, enters the scene of life as a
formative force, there civilisation and culture comes into
existence. t

These spiritual impulses and formative forces *are of the most
varied kinds. The impulse to create the beautiful, to realise
justice, to know the truth, to preserve the past, to enter i*ito
spiritual communication, to invent the new, to extend the range
of human intercommunion, to share the sufferings and joys of
others; the impulse to submit the totality of life to ultimate
directives and give it a meaning, unity and intelligibility, and
finally to place everything under the divine will and receive it
from the hands of God — all these are impulses out of which
culture and civilisation arise.

All the same, we should not idealise culture and civilisation,
as is done so often. These spiritual motives, although trans-
cending biological necessity, are mixed with egoism, lust for
power, and ambition. They are in competition with each other,
one motive trying to displace the others and to monopolise life.
Artistic or scientific impulses can be mixed with irresponsi-
bility, inhuman hardness and brutality. The scientist can be
blind to art, the artist to science, and both can be indifferent to
moral ox religious truth. Religion can become fanatical and
cruel, it can hamper or even cripple art, science, technics, com-
munity, by its prejudices. Although all these spiritual elements
transcend the biological urge, none of them as such is a guar-
antee of true, full humanity. Everyone of them can become a
parasite in relation to the others, or an idol, or a caricature.
The intensity and height of cultural achievement therefore is
no sure mark of a truly human life. Intensity can be in conflict
with harmony or totality. And this conflict can assume the

s

X] SPIRITUAL ESSENTIALS 129

most evil and ugliest forms of the struggle for life. Spiritual
energy, combined with lust for power and egoism, gives, the
animal instincts 5 demoniac power unknown in the animal
realm. The means wl^ich technics and organisation, planning
and association, give to the human will, can produce a kind o£
civilisation which, although it is still characteristic of man, can
lead into catastrophes that may amount to a suicide of humanity.

All these dark aspects belong to the character of human
civilisation, which is the civilisation of sinful men. Civilisation
and culture, then, are not in themselves the opposite of evil and
depravity. They can become the very instruments of evil and
negative forces, as they have always been to a certain extent.
Culture and civilisation, although they belong exclusively to
man, are not in themselves the truly human. True, without
culture and civilisation man cannot be human, but in them-
selves they do not guarantee the truly human character of life.
That is what we have called, in a previous connection, the formal
character of civilisation. Wherever spirit expresses itself, there
is civilised life; but what kind of a spirit creates that civilisation
or culture is another question. Culture is an expression of the
spirit, a formation by spiritual impulse, but this spiritual impulse
can originate from the most different sources, and therefore is
no guarantee of inner unity.

The question then arises whether there exists a spiritual
impulse capable of relating all the other impulses in the right
proportions and unifying them in such a way as to produce a
truly human life. Does there exist an understanding of man
which gives to all the elements of human life — the biological,
economic, technical, scientific, artistic, individual, social and
communal — their full chance, and which at the same time
subdues all of them to that which guarantees true humanity?
Furthermore, is this understanding of man, if it exists, of such
a kind that it is capable of functioning as an organising dynamic,
so that it is not a mere idea but a directing power? As a result
of our investigations we can give a positive answer to these
questions. This conception of man is implicit in the Christian
faith in its New Testament purity and dynamic.

130 CHRISTIAN CIVILISATION AND CULTURE j_LECT.

The Christian faith alone views man as a spiritual-bodily unit
whose powers and impulses, originating from his physical nature
and from his spiritual disposition, are all co-ordinated in such a
way that they are subordinated to a huowi destiny which trans-
cends both the natural and the spiritual life, and is directive of
both. " All are yours, and ye are Christ's, and Christ is God's/'
"Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat" — only
from the tree in the middle of the garden, the tree of the divine
mystery, by reservation of the holy God, man shall not eat. All
that is creature is in a specific way subordinated to man, but he
himself with all his life and powers is subordinated to God who
is holy love and who destines men for communion with Himself
and with each other. Man is created to subdue and l^gLve
dominion over all creation, but " whether you eat or drink or
whatsoever you do, do all to the glory of God This is the
programme of life given to men by the Creator : free develop-
ment of all their powers, free use of all the means under the
dominion of the One who grves all and ordains all to Himself.

Now, before we go on to enlarge this Biblical idea of culture,
some questions have to be taken up which obtrude themselves
from the standpoint of history. As we have seen, in our first
lecture, the New Testament shows very little interest in the
specific tasks of civilisation and culture. How then can faith,
which seems so indifferent to culture, be its basis? Our answer
is twofold. First, it is true that the main concern of* the New
Testament message is not culture or civilisation, not the tem-
poral but the eternal, not the earthly but the heavenly life.
The Gospel is not f ocussed on culture, but on the world-to-come.
" This world passes away and with it civilisation. Christian
faith, indeed, is alive only where the life with God in Christ and
the eternal kingdom of God is the centre of interest. " Seek ye
first His kingdom and His righteousness." The kingdom of
God is not human civilisation. It stands above both the physical
and the cultural life. That is the first thing which has to be
said. The second point, however, which must be repeated, is
that this perspective of the kingdom of God does not alienate
men from their temporal life. Faith in the kingdom and in

x] t5e means and the end 131

eternal life does not make men indifferent to the tasks which
earthly existence lays upon them. On the contrary, the
Christian is sumrr^ned to tackle them with special energy, and
his faith gives him the j>ower to solve these problems better than
he could without faith. " Seek ye first the kingdom of God
. . . and these things shall be added unto you." It is precisely
the man whose first concern is not culture but the kingdom of
God that has the necessary distance from cultural aims and
the necessary perspective to serve them in freedom, and to grasp
that order which prevents the various sections of civilisation
from monopolising the totality of life. Only from beyond
civilisation can its order and harmony come.

It is a humanistic superstition to believe that the man to
whom culture is everything is the true bearer of culture. The
opposite is true. Culture necessarily degenerates where it is
made God. Culture-idolatry is the sure road to cultural decay.
If culture is to become and to remain truly human, it must have
a culture-transc&iding centre. Man is more than his culture.
Culture is means and tool, but not the essence of human life.
It is not culture that gives man his humanity, but it is the
human man that creates a human culture. That is why it is a
grave error to think that the Christian faith is the enemy of
culture, or at least indifferent to it, because it so emphatically
accentuates the culture-transcending centre of life.

But what is the verdict of history? I think that, correcdy
interpreted, it confirms what has just been said. It is true that
there have been Christian movements showing a kind of cultural
asceticism, that there have been times when faith and theological
interest absorbed men to such a degree that they neglected their
cultural obligations. It is true that the Christian Church has
sometimes obstructed the development of science or other
cultural functions. While we are not justified in taking these
negative facts too lightly, we are obliged on the other hand to
beware of rash inferences. We have always to make sure first
whether it is really Christian faith that acts, and secondly
whether it is really cultural values that are at stake. In
Occidental history so many things have usurped the name of

K

132 CHRISTIAN CIVILISATION AND CULTURE [LECT.

" Christian " which were only half Christian or pseudo-
Christian. On the other hand, so many things have been postu-
lated in the name of cultural necessity that we?e pseudo-cultural.
Because it is of the nature of sin that one branch of life wants to
develop at the cost of another equally important, and because it
is a temptation for the cultured man to idolise culture and
thereby deprive it of its truly human character, it must always
be the foremost interest of the Christian to proclaim faith and
love as the source and norm of all true humanity. By doing
this, he does, in the long run, the best service to culture.

Finally, there is always a certain tendency in cultural human-
ism to understand spirit and culture in such a way that so-called
" higher " culture becomes detached from every-day life, from
marriage and family, from civic order and from social oblfga-
tions. Such a humanism is inclined to forget that the soundness
of family life is the basis of all true civilisation, that justice and
freedom in public life are necessary presuppositions of all higher
culture. There is a certain aristocracy of spiriC which has little
interest in popular education, or in the task of giving a real
meaning to the work of the ordinary man, and which focusses
all its interest on science, art and so-called higher culture. Such
an attitude proves detrimental to real culture. It is at this point
that the importance of the Christian view of life becomes parti-
cularly obvious. All this makes the question of the relations
between historical Christianity and civilisation so complicated
that it is hardly possible to reach a final judgment. On one
point, however, we can speak without reserve: the history of
civilisation during the last hundred years has made clear beyond
any doubt that the progressive decline of Christian influence has
caused a progressive decay of civilisation. But even that may
remain doubtful to one who personally has no understanding of
what Christian faith means.

These preliminaries being settled, we can now proceed to
develop a little further the Christian idea of culture and civilisa-
tion. We start from the statement that human culture
presupposes human man. It is not culture that makes man
human, but it is human man who makes culture human. This

X] DIVINE AND HUMAN RELATIONS I33

order of things is given with the Christian faith. Man comes
first, not civilised life. Man becomes human, not by cukure
and civilisation, b&t by understanding his human destiny. In
the Christian revelation the destiny of man is love. The measure
of culture is personality; more exactly, person-in-communion.
Creative individuality is no equivalent of personal life in com-
munity. God is love — that is the centre of the Christian
message, and this doctrine is exclusively Christian. Love is the
first and the last, the ultimate reality, being the very essence of
God. Love is not one amongst others, not one virtue alongside
other virtues ; love is no virtue at all : it is true humanity, as it
is the essence of God. This love, agape in the New Testament
sen^e, is no natural disposition. It is acquired by faith. Man is
created for this love : that is why he has a longing for it. But
in spite of this natural longing, man does not have it by birth,
he has to receive it as a supernatural gift. By this, his eternal
destiny, man is ^ulture-transcending. The meaning of his life
is not in culture; on the contrary, it is his task to express and to
realise this culture-transcending destiny in his cultural life.
Culture then is means, expression, tool of true humanity, but
not its origin and aim.

The first consequence of this conception of life is that the
most important thing in life is the relation between man and
man. Therefore it is not impersonal spiritual activity, it is not
spiritual creation as such, but it is the formation of truly per-
sonal social relationships, which is the basis of true culture.
There is more real culture in a truly human family life without
art and science than in the highest achievements of art and
science on the basis of neglected family life and degenerate
sex-relations.

The second consequence of Christian anthropology is the
acknowledgment of man's bodily-spiritual unity. In contrast
with idealistic humanism, Christian faith does not despise the
body and the bodily needs. The Christian doctrine of incarna-
tion obliges the Christian to take the body and its needs
seriously, and gives him the double task of incorporating the
spirit and spiritualising the bodily life. Spirituality detached

134 CHRISTIAN CIVILISATION AND CULTURE [LECT.

from the concerns of the body contradicts the Biblical doctrine
of creation and produces an abstract kind of culture. The
Christian understanding of corporal-spiritual unity has two
consequences. First, it places the body r under the direction of
the spirit. Second, it takes seriously the problems of manual
work, economy and material property. From this point of view
a decent and meaningful order of every-day life and healthy
economic conditions are important criteria of true civilisation.
A well-ordered estate, with dignified houses of simple* beauty
and a carefully-managed farm, is a surer indication of true
culture than a marvellous university, a famous academy of art,
in the midst of a peasant or industrial proletariat. The Christian
ethos has — paradoxical as this may appear — a strongly bourgeois
trait, if we understand this word in its original sense of well-
ordered citizenship. In the New Testament, eschatology —
which certainly is the very opposite of anything bourgeois — is
combined with a sober and earnest ethic of work and an
intention to equalise social conditions. One might say with
Kierkegaard, that this bourgeois element is the necessary
outward incognito of the essentially anti-boufgeois heart and
mind of the Christian.

The primacy of personal relations, as distinguished from
purely abstract spiritual creativity, has another important
consequence. In the Christian conception of sin it is not sensu-
ality but egoism and pride which hold the first place. That is
why those dangers which come from lust of power are taken
most seriously, and why a high premium is placed upon good
government and public justice. Social relations cannot be in
accordance with human dignity if this lust for power is not
kept within firm barriers in economic as well as in political life.
To lead a truly human life, man must have an intangible sphere
of freedom guaranteed by law. For this reason the Christian
must regard civic order, security, and a certain homogeneity in
the sphere of economics, as an important criterion of cultural
soundness. Wherever public institutions give evidence of the
will to form human life as a community of free personalities,
there is culture.

X] TRADITION AND EDUCATION 135

From the same source derives the high valuation of tradition
and social custom. These conservative forces, which limfc the
freedom of the Individual, however, are not without strong
counter-weights, origii&ating from the Christian hope of a new
world. It may be said, perhaps, that in the Christian view of a
good life the conservative elements are stressed so much because
otherwise the eschatological perspective of the Christian faith
might lead to an illusionist revolutionary attitude. On the
other fciand, tradition and social custom are an expression of the
sense of responsibility and mutual obligation. They represent
the element of •solidarity and loyalty, helping the individual — if
they are not stressed too much — to acquire mature independence.

Qne of the most obvious contributions of Christianity to
civilised life is its pre-eminent interest in education and instruc-
tion. Again, the Christian view of education is characterised by
its personalism. It is not knowledge and ability which stand in
the first rank, but education of responsible personality and social
training. Wherever Christian tradition has been alive, it has
influenced the educational life of the nations in this direction.
In contrast with'it, the dechristianisation of Continental Europe,
as the result first of an abstract spiritualism of a humanistic type
and later on of materialistic utilitarianism, have resulted in an
almost complete neglect of the personal and social element in
education, and in the preponderance of abstract educational
aims, such as knowledge and professional ability. Pestalozzi's
idea of education, deeply rooted in the Christian understanding
of life, and therefore putting responsible personality and love in
the first place, has been entirely misunderstood or neglected, in
spite of its fame.

It is only in the last place in a Christian programme of civilisa-
tion that we find what in the humanistic programme comes
first : the so-called higher culture, embracing the purely spiritual
elements, such as science and art. The expression, " higher
culture is justified in so far as in this realm the activity of the
spirit is most remote from animalic urge and biological neces-
sity. It is also, and for the same reason, the field of a spiritual
ilite* It is the realm of spiritual creativity. While in principle

I36 CHRISTIAN CIVILISATION AND CULTURE [LECT.

everyone can be good, only a few can be creative; the creative
genjjis is the exception, and it is he who produces the works of
which we mostly think when speaking of culture. It is, how-
ever, characteristic of the Christian conception of culture and
civilisation to give these peak manifestations less importance
than does idealistic humanism, for it is not science, art and
spiritual activity which give life its truly human content, but
love.

This specific order of values, however, does not prevent the
Christian from giving art and science, as well as so-called higher
education, a characteristic aim and meaning. .Science as the
search for truth, and art as the creation of the beautiful, are
given the highest possible meaning : divine service. Wherever
truth is known, something of the mystery of creation is revealed.
The true scientist is a servant of God. To know and to acknow-
ledge God is not a hindrance but, on the contrary, a help, in the
search for truth. It keeps us from false absolutism and
relativism, from idolatry of reason, and from sceptical despair.
The scientist working, like Kepler, under highest command and
for the honour of God is free from mean ambition and jealousy.
The same is true of the artist. There is nothing which ennobles
and purifies his creative powers so much as the conviction that
he is a servant of God, called to praise the Creator and to mani-
fest the secret which unites spirit and nature. It need not be
proved, because it is proved already by history, that art can never
rise higher than the point where the artist takes his highest
inspiration devoutly as a gift of the Creator. There alone art is
safeguarded from false aestheticism and idolatry of genius, as
well as from that formalism and barbarism which lead to the
ruin of art.

The second direction which Christian faith gives to the higher
culture is service of man. To be sure, science remains sound
only where it is not dominated by the principle of utility. Art
degenerates if it becomes subservient to any aim outside of
itself. Purpose-free science and purpose-free art are identical
with true science and true art. All the same, if this is taken as
the last word, a perilous dualism results; somewhere there must

X] THE SERVICE OF ART AND SCIENCE 1%J

be a urfity between truth and beauty on the one side and the
good life on the other. This connection, however, must b« very
high if it is not to degrade art and science. This highest unity
is God. God is the origin of truth and beauty, as well as the
Creator of nature and the body, and the source of the moral
order. Apart from God there is no possibility of uniting the
principle of service with the principle of disinterested search for
truth and beauty. God alone, theonomy, is the guarantee that
such disinterested quest, such " autonomy " of science and art,
does not contradict ethical standards.

It is not at ail necessary that art, in order to honour God, must
be "religious" art or Church art; neither is it necessary that
science should be subordinated to theology. Science and art
serve men best if they remain true to their own laws. They
must be " autonomous But if this autonomy is ultimate,
final, it cannot but degenerate into sterile inhuman intellectualist
" scientism " ajjd into Vart -pour Vart aestheticism. If, how-
ever, their autonomy is understood as theonomy, they keep
their independence and yet are united to natural life and ethical
principles by a c unity standing above all of them. This is not
mere theory but historical experience. It is what we have learnt
from the greatest men of science and of art. Filled with rever-
ence for God, the ultimate source of truth and beauty, they
remained true to the immanent law of truth and beauty. And
in doing so, they served their fellow men much better than by
any direct subordination to moral or utilitarian requirements.
That is to say, the different spheres of higher culture have their
autonomy, but at the same time they are linked with each other,
not directly, not horizontally, but vertically, communicating
with each other only by reference to the same source of their
autonomy.

One last characteristic trait of the Christian idea of civilisation
and culture relates to these two words as such. Why do we
need two words, and which should take precedence? As
everyone knows, there is a remarkable difference, again, between
the German use of the words, on the one hand, and the English
and French use on the other. In German it has become

138 CHRISTIAN CIVILISATION AND CULTURE [LECT.

customary to think of Zivilisation as something much lower
than *Kultur, meaning primarily the technical aspect of what the
English and French call civilisation. This degradation of
" civilisation " is the result of that onesicbd idealistic spirituali-
sation which puts the purely spiritual things in the first place,
calling them " higher " culture. The French and particularly
the English use of words, however, is based on the high estimate
of the civic element in all civilisation, the social and political
element of justice and freedom, without which no true culture
can exist. We need not repeat what has already been said in
favour of this latter conception. It is a Christian heritage.
Because in the Christian conception of man the relation between
man and man is more important than the so-called " higher "
culture, the problems of social and political order and, above all,
those of marriage, family, and education, are basic in the
Christian conception of civilisation and culture. We cannot put
so-called higher culture in the first place, and therefore we cannot
agree that civilisation be subordinated to culture. If we had to
use one word only, we would rather use the word civilisation
than the word culture, as we have done so far.

Having thus sketched the Christian idea of civilisation in
rough outline, we can now, in conclusion, turn back to the
very beginning of our lectures, to the question: What are
the chances of a Christian civilisation in our age? The
prospect seems to be very bad indeed, and we should not in
closing make ourselves guilty of a false and facile optimism.
Yet pessimism cannot be our attitude either. There is a German
proverb: Des Menschen Verlegenheiten sind Gottes Gelegen-
heiten. 1 The terrible perspectives which are placed before us by
the dechristianisation of the world during the past two centuries
. have opened the eyes of many of our contemporaries to the true
foundations of civilisation and to the importance of the Christian
tradition. It is not only the physicists and technicians, terri-
fied by their latest results, that have become conscious of the
imminent peril of human civilisation and are looking out for a
new spiritual basis of life, but also the jurists, the sociologists,

* M^R*s extremity, God's opportunity.

X] WHAT OF THE OUTLOOK? 1 39

the psychologists, and — last, not least — the artists and poets.
The lowest point of secularisation seems to be behind us. Iji all
spheres of civilised life there is a new search for the foundation
of a really human civilisation, and in this search the Christian
tradition is rediscovered. I do not prophesy an epoch of general
return to Christianity, any more than I accept the myth of the
Christian culture of the past. If I did, I should be guilty of a
new kind of determinism, mistaking for predictable necessity
what is a matter of decision. Mankind is confronted with a
decision of incomparable consequence. All we can say is this :
^the decision may be made in the right sense, there is nothing
impossible about it; but whether it will be taken in the right
sei^se, nobody can know. It is sufficient that everyone who sees
it should do what is required of him.

EPILOGUE

CHRISTIANITY BEYOND CIVILISATION

THE gospel of the redemption and salvation of the world
in Jesus Christ is not meant to be a programme"^ for any
kind of civilisation or culture. Civilisation and culture,
even at their best, are temporal; they belong to this earthly life.
The gospel, however, is the revelation of eternal life. Civilisa-
tions and cultures come and go, just as man in his visible
appearance comes and goes. But man as a person is not meant
to pass away; he is destined by the Creator for eternity. That
is why he is more than any culture or civilisation. The gospel
of Jesus Christ is the revelation of this his destiny beyond and
above historical life. To believe in this gospel means to be
incorporated into the invisible world which is " beyond " and
" above " the visible, that world the full manifestation of which
will be the end of this visible historical world, with all its
civilisations and cultures.

That is why the first and main concern of the Christian can
never be civilisation and culture. His main concern is his
relation to God in Jesus Christ, that life which is "hid with
Christ his sharing in God's forgiving mercy in the fellowship
with those who also, like himself, have become participants of
God's revelation and redemption and of his firm hope in the
fulfilment of God's promise of the eternal kingdom. This
Christian faith therefore cuts across all forms of historical life
with their different forms of civilisation, good and bad. It
is not identical with any of them and none of them can ever
be thought of as its adequate expression, All the differ-
ences between forms of civilised and cultural life are relative,
whilst their distance from the eternal kingdom of God is
absolute.

The Christian, then, and the fellowship of the Christians; are

140

THE FINAL GOAL 141

ultimately independent of all the changes — for good or evil —
within the sphere of civilisation. They stand on a rock which no
^historical changes can move. Even the most terrifying antici-
pations for the further development of civilisation cannot —
ultimately — shake, neither can any progress towards good
confirm — ultimately — their faith in the final goal which God
has set for all his universe and all mankind. The things of
civilisation and culture, even their best, belong to "the flesh
which ^cannot inherit immortal life". The Christian Church
knows that no progress in the sphere of civilisation and culture
can reach that goal of history beyond history, and that no set-
backs, not even the complete destruction of civilised life, can
defect history from that ultimate goal which is beyond itself.
In this sense then the Christian faith is indeed " other-worldly "
and the Church should not be ashamed of saying so.

It is by this other-worldliness that true Christianity is " the
salt of the earth " and " the light of the world It is by its
independence of the course of history that it can best serve the
cause of a truly human civilisation and culture. It is by her
very other-woridliness that the primitive Church of the first
centuries gave the impulses for the best of those new forms of
life which, with caution, may be called Christian civilisation.
It is the paradox of the Christian existence that its other-worldli-
ness proves to be the strongest force of renewal and preservation
in the different domains of cultural life. Why this is so and
how, we have tried to show in these lectures. God wants us to
be in this world and to do our best in humanising and person-
alising its life. But we can render this service only when we
know that this is not our primary but only our secondary task,
as we keep ourselves free from all illusions of universal progress
and of despair in sight of general degeneration and dissolution.
Utopias are poor substitutes for real hope and despair is their
almost necessary concomitant. In all times of Christian history
it was those Christian men and groups of men who did not
believe in progress who did the most to move the world in real
progress. This creative and constructive contribution of
Christianity to civilisation is, so to speak, a mere by-product of

142 CHRISTIANITY BEYOND CIVILISATION [LECT.

real Christian faith, but it is a necessary by-product by which
its cfeeper reality can be gauged.

The problems of our present-day civilisatiofi are so grave and
pressing that even Christians may thinly it their duty to make -
them their primary concern and to consider belief in eternity as
a kind of luxury. They are utterly wrong. The problems of our
day have become so incomparably complicated and difficult just
because people do not believe in eternal life any more. They are
seized by a kind of time-panic. Not believing in the "eternal
Kingdom they try to make this world a paradise and by doing
so they create a state of things which is more akin to hell than^
to heaven. The loss of real hope, i.e. hope in eternal life, creates
Utopias, and Utopias may be considered as one of the main repots
of our present-day chaos. If man loses the real hope he has to
choose between illusions and despair, and mostly he vacillates
between the two in a spiritual condition which the psychiatrists
describe as " depressive-maniac ". ^

The real Christian is sober in his expectation for and from this
temporal world. He knows that it cannot transcend its limits
of death and sin. He knows also that it is the place where God
can do marvellous things. He feels himself called upon by his
Lord as His instrument by Whom he wants to do those things
which man without the divine faith, love and hope cannot do.
Still he knows that by all his doings the most he can achieve is
to " salt " and to " leaven " the world, but not to save it from
death and sin. And if he is a real Christian, he always is
deeply conscious of his own shortcomings.

The Christian faith and hope in eternal life has been dis-
credited, not without reason, during the last century, through
having been used as a cheap substitute for justice and social
responsibility. We cannot blame the Marxists for calling
religion an " opium for the people " because that is what they all
too often found it to be. There is, indeed, a false Christian
other-worldliness which has done more harm to the cause of
Christ than most other vices of Christian individuals and
groups. But abusus non tollit usum. The false understanding
of other-worldliness does not make the true other-worldliness

Xl] T&E ULTIMATE DECISION I43

false. Christianity which is no more other-worldly has erased
to be Christian. This other-worldliness is the root of ^true
realism which hopes and works in and for this world without
^illusion and without despair.

God has cheated man for both this world and the world to
come. He therefore made him capable of creating civilisation
and culture and gave him the final destiny beyond them. It
is the knowledge of this final destiny which makes Christianity
capable' 1 of giving civilisation and culture an element which
otherwise they do not have, the element of radical personalism
and communaUsm, which are at bottom the same thing. A
civilisation and a culture, as it would grow out of a truly
Christian community, would be characterised by personalism
and communalised creativity. But this very personalism and
communalism is entirely the outcome of that faith and hope
which have their roots as well as their aim beyond history.

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